


the fire in your chest gone out

by beckettemory



Category: Leverage
Genre: Background early-stage relationship Nate/Sophie, Doctors & Physicians, Especially Nate, Families of Choice, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I'm not a doctor but I've done tons of research so maybe this is somewhat accurate, NO PROMISES THO, Nate is haunted by his past, No one seems to realize how treatable pneumonia is, Platonic Relationships, Pneumonia, Sickfic, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-04-25 18:10:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 19,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14384205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beckettemory/pseuds/beckettemory
Summary: The crew really couldn't afford to be without Parker for more than a couple days. They could run parts of a job, but without a thief to round out the crew, they were screwed, and they all knew it.So Parker tried to work through a nasty cough, until Nate recognized the sound.In his memory, that sound was coupled with the smell of hospital antiseptic, the frantic beeps of his son's heart rate skyrocketing.The job could wait. Surely, it could wait.





	1. Chapter 1

As long as Parker could see and breathe, she was fine, and even seeing was kind of optional. If she was restrained she knew she could break free. If she was trapped she knew she could exploit the trap or captors’ weaknesses and get out. And she knew it took her eyes almost exactly four minutes to completely adjust to darkness from strong light, far less than average people. 

But if Parker couldn’t breathe, she was done for. All stealth was gone, all carefulness abandoned, all friendships dissolved and she did what she had to do to get air again. 

She hadn’t survived this long to suffocate alone. She better go out in a blaze of glory or not at all. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: medication, references to suffocation, medical stuff (probably not a good fic for you if you're not good with medical stuff), references to gun violence, medical self-neglect, slightly coercive medical treatment

Hardison was just putting final touches on the briefing powerpoint when Parker showed up. It was odd; she was never the last to get there, and they never anticipated her arrival by hearing her. Nate was always the last one to briefings, though they were held in his apartment, but today the rest of the team was assembled and chatting by the time Parker came in, her footsteps heavier (meaning they were actually audible for a change) and her shoulders slumped.

Chatter quieted as the rest of the team noticed what Hardison had: Parker looked… terrible. She was pale and had dark circles under her eyes. Instead of tight black clothes like she usually wore, she dressed in a black hoodie with the hood up, and regular, mid-wash jeans. Her hair was loose and looked tangled.

No one addressed her, they just watched with varying levels of interest and concern as she made her way to the couch and plopped down with a soft sigh of relief next to Eliot.

“Sup, Parker?” Hardison asked, trying to keep his voice casual. Eliot was frowning at her, his brow furrowed as he took stock of their thief.

“My alarm didn’t go off,” Parker explained shortly, sounding grumpy.

Nate looked mildly surprised. “I thought you didn’t set alarms.”

Parker shifted in her seat grumpily and didn’t answer.

“You good?” Eliot asked.

“I’m fine,” Parker snapped, and shoved herself up, looking like she was going to head for the armchair on the other side of the briefing area. She only took a step, however, before coughs started wracking her small frame. The first few were quiet, almost whispery, like a slow leak in a tire, but they progressed into louder, stronger coughs. She coughed so hard she had to stop moving, and nearly doubled over. In between coughs she gasped in air, her eyes wide and watering, and her face turned red.

Eliot got to his feet, holding out his hands to steady Parker, and Sophie already had her hand on her cell phone, apparently ready to call for an ambulance. Hardison was frozen in his perch on the arm of the sofa. All the blood had drained out of Nate’s face and he sat back in his chair, eyes somewhere in the past.

“Easy,” Eliot soothed, one hand on Parker’s back, the other gripped tight in both of hers.

After nearly a full, horrible minute, Parker’s coughs subsided and she breathed hard and swiped at her eyes. Eliot slowly walked her over to the chair she had been heading for and eased her down.

“I’m fine,” she said when she was settled, and pushed Eliot’s hands away. “Run the thing,” she snapped at Hardison tiredly.

“No, hold on,” Eliot griped back, still standing next to her. “How long has this been going on?”

They’d taken a break for the last week, after finishing a long and hard job. Hardison had seen Eliot and that’s it, playing video games for Hardison’s review blog. Nate and Sophie’s passports, two of their fake ones, had been pinged entering Laos last week, and then again entering the States yesterday morning. For all Hardison knew Parker could have done anything or gone anywhere. None of her passports were pinged, but Hardison didn't flatter himself by thinking her only identities were the ones he'd created for her.

Parker grumbled to herself in an impressive accidental Eliot impression and slumped farther down in the chair.

“Parker,” Sophie said. “We just want to make sure this isn't anything serious.”

Parker leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I'll be fine in a couple days. Just run the thing.”

“You can't crawl through air ducts like that,” Nate said, having regained his grip on the reality around him. “You'd get caught in ten seconds flat.”

Parker growled but didn't answer or move.

Eliot, annoyed with her evasion, gave up and put his hand on her forehead. She smacked his hand away faster than most people could move, but significantly slower than usual.

“Knock it off,” Eliot griped, and put his hand back. His brow furrowed even further. “Shit, Park, you're burning up.”

“I'm _fine,”_ Parker repeated, smacking his hand away again.

“You are not,” Eliot argued.

Sophie got up and went up the spiral staircase as Eliot and Hardison argued with Parker. She returned a minute later with a thermometer, which she handed over to Eliot.

“Come on. Open up,” Eliot said, brandishing the thermometer at Parker.

Parker scowled and snatched it away from him, putting it under her own tongue and hitting the button, then sitting back with her arms crossed. In a few moments it beeped, and Eliot took it back. His eyebrows shot up.

“101.9º,” he said, and looked to Nate.

“Yeah, that's it,” Nate said with a sigh. He stood. “Go home and rest, Parker. We'll be fine for this job.”

Parker whined and sat forward to protest, but at the movement she was wracked by coughs again.

Hardison shot to his feet and crossed the room before he knew what he was doing. He knelt next to Parker’s chair and rubbed her back. When her coughs started to subside she shrugged his hand off.

“Go. Home,” Nate said again, more firmly.

Parker, worryingly, didn't protest. She just nodded wearily and wiped at her watering eyes.

“I'll drive you home,” Hardison said. “Come on.” He looked up at Nate. “Briefing can hold off for a bit?”

Nate nodded. “Yeah, take your time,” he said. He stepped over and hit a couple keys on Hardison’s wireless keyboard, and the screens went to black.

Hardison helped Parker up, not commenting on how much help she seemed to need, and started heading to the door.

“I'll pick up some stuff and meet you there,” Eliot said.

“She doesn't like grape flavored cough syrup,” Hardison reminded him.

At Parker’s warehouse Hardison frowned at, but didn't comment on the state of disarray. Parker was neat to a fault, but crumpled tissues lay discarded around an overflowing waste bin and cereal bowls stacked up high in the sink.

It didn’t take any coaxing at all for Parker to get in bed. She didn’t even take off her shoes until Hardison made her. It was like she had completely given up on the act and was leaning in to being sick.

Every few minutes in the car and any time she exerted herself whatsoever she was hit with another coughing fit which left her gasping for air. Each time Hardison got more and more worried. Parker was probably the strongest one in the crew, including Eliot. Whatever this was had to be bad.

Once Parker was settled in bed, Hardison rummaged around in the meager bathroom storage for anything that would help, but the only medical supplies he found were a roll of athletic tape, a box of Disney Princess bandaids, and a bottle of ibuprofen. He pulled out his phone and sent a message to Eliot.

Hardison: _“Park has z e r o medical supplies, better get basics too”_

Eliot responded: _“Thought as much. Even NSAIDs?”_

Hardison: _“She’s got ibuprofen”_

Eliot: _“Thats something at least. Be there in 20.”_

Hardison returned to the main space in the warehouse and, after checking on Parker, started washing the dishes in the sink.

“Hardison?” Parker said quietly after a few minutes.

“Yeah?” he answered, turning around with a soapy bowl in his hands.

She was settled down into her pillows and blankets, and held the blankets up to her chin. She looked exhausted. “I’m freezing,” she whined.

Hardison quickly rinsed the bowl and dried his hands. “Where d’you keep your extra blankets?” he asked as he stepped into the loose circle made by task boards, mesh racks, and a dresser.

“Don’t have any,” Parker said. Up close Hardison could see that she was shivering.

Hardison clucked his tongue. “I’ll have Eliot bring some.” He went closer and sat on the edge of the bed, then felt her forehead. Still feverish. “Damn.”

Parker closed her eyes, snuggled in more, and shivered.

“You never answered Eliot, Park,” Hardison reminded her. “How long’s this been going on?”

Parker sighed. “A day. Maybe twenty-six hours. But I was sick the other day, with something else,” she said.

“You shoulda called us,” Hardison said.

“This is nothing,” Parker scoffed. “I can take care of myself.”

“You can?” Hardison asked in a deadpan. “Tell me, what do you take for a headache?”

Parker shrugged. “Aspirin?” she said.

“Nope,” Hardison replied. He stood and headed back to the sink. “You don't have to take care of yourself. You got us to help.”

He was just drying the last cereal bowl when Eliot arrived. Hardison fiddled with the many locks, all retooled by Parker exactly how she liked them, and finally heaved open the huge vault door. Parker took security seriously, maybe even more than Eliot did.

“Took you long enough,” Eliot griped as he stepped in with a big grocery bag and a second bearing a pharmacy logo. He had a backpack with a caduceus patch slung over his shoulder.  

“Could say the same to you,” Hardison shot back. He and Eliot took a minute to reset all of the security measures before crossing the wide warehouse to the living area.

“Alright, Park, sit up,” Eliot said, setting the bags on the small kitchen table.

“Noooo,” Parker whined. “I'm comfyyyy.”

“Not optional,” Eliot said.

Hardison was struck by how no-nonsense Eliot was with Parker when she was sick. Usually they were partners in crime (no pun intended), sniping at Hardison or Nate on the same wavelength or sitting in contented silence for hours on end each doing their own thing. But when Parker was sick Eliot’s demeanor changed completely, to a compassionate but exasperated one, like an older sibling tasked with keeping their little sibling out of trouble and taking it seriously.

Hardison was equally surprised that Parker listened to Eliot. She griped and dragged her feet, but she always gave in eventually, letting him bully her into eating green vegetables or take her temperature or rest an injured joint. What was going on in that blonde head of hers?

Parker grumbled and sat up in bed, throwing her hood back up and squinting in the light.

“Alright,” Eliot said, ripping open a package from the pharmacy bag and fiddling with a digital thermometer. “Put this under your tongue til it beeps.”

Parker complied with minimal griping and Eliot resumed rummaging through the bags.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered.

“What?” Hardison asked.

“Forgot to pick up garlic,” Eliot said.

“Garlic?”

“For soup,” Eliot said.

“I can run and grab some if you're good here. Did you bring any blankets?” Hardison asked.

“Didn't get a chance,” Eliot said.

The thermometer beeped and Eliot took it back. He cursed.

“How's it looking?” Hardison asked worriedly.

“Climbed a bit. 102.1º.”

“Oof. You need anything else while I'm out?” Hardison asked.

“Blankets, garlic… Some more Gatorade wouldn't hurt,” Eliot said, gesturing to the grocery bag.

“Yep,” Hardison said, heading for the door. “Make her get some sleep,” he called.

“No!” Parker protested, but the rest of her retort was cut off by coughing.

 

* * *

 

 

Eliot didn't like the sound of Parker’s cough. It was wet and hacking, and wouldn’t let up even for her to breathe until it was done. She was coughing up stuff, and a scattering of used tissues lay in the vague vicinity of the trashcan. Her cough told Eliot there was something more going on than just a chest cold. 

Once Eliot had locked the doors again after Hardison left, he dug around in his bags again until he pulled out a stethoscope. Parker started to laugh, but her coughing stopped that quickly. 

“Easy,” Eliot soothed as he sat on the bed next to her. 

“I’m not  _ that  _ sick,” she said when she could breathe again, pointing to the stethoscope. Eliot noted with some satisfaction that she was at least not claiming to not be sick anymore. He could deal with “not that sick.” 

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said. He caught her when she made to lay back down. “Hold on, sit up a minute, let me listen to ya.” 

“Noooo,” she whined, but leaned forward again until she could sit up unaided. She was shivering. 

“Deep breaths,” Eliot instructed. 

Parker’s lungs were a train wreck. Eliot heard crackling sounds with every breath, and one lobe didn't have any breath sounds at all. 

Parker caught a glimpse at Eliot’s frown when he pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and set it aside. 

“What?” 

“Your lungs sound like shit,” Eliot said, not wanting to give voice to his suspicions as though speaking the words would make it true. 

Eliot went back to the bags on the table and rummaged through his backpack, then came up with a small clamp. 

“What's that?” Parker asked as Eliot fiddled with the tiny buttons on one side. 

“Pulse oximeter,” Eliot said shortly. 

“Huh?” 

“Gimme your hand,” he said, and when she hesitantly complied he clipped it onto her fingertip. “Tells me how much oxygen is in your blood an’ how fast your heart's beating.” 

Parker watched the small screen on the oximeter as numbers flashed across it. Eliot waited for them to stabilize, then unclipped it and made a note of the numbers on a pad of paper he’d pulled out of his bag. 

“Why do you have that stuff?” Parker asked suspiciously as Eliot dug around in his bags again. 

Eliot chuckled. “I took some EMT classes a while back.” 

Parker’s eyes widened. “You're a paramedic?” 

“No,” Eliot said. “Paramedics are the highest rank of emergency medicine. EMTs are lower. An’ I'm not certified.” 

“Why not?” 

Eliot shrugged. “Woulda had to do clinical rotations to take the certification exam, an’ we were busy.” 

Next came a blood pressure cuff and Eliot shushed Parker so he could get an accurate reading. Parker wiggled, skewing the results, and he scolded her lightly before trying again. The second time he got a clear reading; her blood pressure was low, but not dangerously so. 

Parker had a million questions for him about this new revelation; Eliot could see them in her eyes, and he didn't want her to tire herself out or get excited, so he answered as many as he could think of as he jotted down her vitals and measured out a dose of ibuprofen. 

“Took the classes after the bank job when Nate got shot. Two weeks of classes, remember I disappeared for a couple weeks? I'm not certified, so don't go calling me a paramedic. I can't intubate or anything that advanced. You eaten anything today?” 

Parker shook her head. “I'm not hungry.” 

“You should eat before you take this, or it might upset your stomach,” Eliot said, rattling the pill bottle at her. 

Parker made a face and Eliot sighed. 

“Listen,” he said. “You got a fever, an’ I'm willin’ to bet you got a headache too. That right?” Parker nodded hesitantly. “This is just regular old ibuprofen. It'll help your fever and the headache. You achy?” 

Parker slumped down into the covers, covering her face, and coughed weakly. “No,” she said, but Eliot could tell she was lying. 

“It'll help with that, too.” 

Parker peeked out at him, her eyes narrowed. “What's wrong with me?” she asked. 

“Few more questions,” he evaded. “Hurt when you cough?” 

Parker nodded, still looking suspicious. 

“Hurt when you breathe?” 

One curt nod. 

“How much? One to ten.” 

“Three?” 

“Nauseous?” 

Parker shook her head. Well. One piece of good news. 

“What’s wrong with me?” Parker asked again, a little more insistent this time. 

“Maybe pneumonia,” Eliot said, finally willing to voice his suspicion. “An’ if it keeps progressing like pneumonia, I'm takin’ you to the doctor.” 

Parker stared at him for a long second, then started laughing. Eliot waited, his patience wearing thin. 

“You don't go to the doctor for pneumonia, dummy,” Parker said. 

“What--yes, you do, Park. The hell you talkin’ about?” 

Parker got caught up in a short coughing fit, but kept giggling when she could breathe again. 

“You're almost an emergency medical technician and you think you go to the doctor for pneumonia,” Parker said between giggles. “What next, going to the doctor for broken bones?” 

Eliot stared at her for a long second.  _ “Yes,”  _ he said. 

_ “You _ don't,” Parker pointed out. 

“ _ I'm _ different,” Eliot retorted. “I'd be in a full-body cast most of the time if I went in for broken bones. But  _ most  _ people get medical treatment for fractures.” 

Parker scoffed. “Sounds fake but okay.” 

Eliot rolled his eyes and handed her two pills and a bottle of Gatorade. “Take that and drink some of this, an’ then I want you to nap while I make some soup, alright?” 

Parker stuck out her tongue at him but took the pills and grimaced. “Do I have to sleep?” 

“No,” Eliot said, giving up. “You can just lay in bed for all I care, but you're not gettin’ up, an’ you're not botherin’ me.”

 

* * *

 

Parker was asleep when Hardison returned with groceries. Eliot shushed him and they quietly relatched all the locks on the door. 

“How long’s she been out?” Hardison whispered. 

“Not long. Ten minutes, give or take.” 

Hardison frowned at a pulse oximeter on the table. “Where'd you get that?” 

Eliot sighed in exasperation. “I'm not gettin’ into it again. I took some EMT classes a while back, no, I'm not certified, an’ I woulda had to do clinical rotations to take the exams. Gimme the garlic,” he said, effectively ending the line of questioning.

Hardison held up his hands in surrender. “Damn, fine.” He handed over the head of garlic and started unfolding the blankets he’d brought. 

Parker stirred but didn’t wake up when he spread the blankets over her bed. She was shivering lightly in her sleep, but as he watched her shivers subsided under the two new blankets. 

“So what’s the diagnosis?” Hardison asked as he returned to the small kitchen area. “Since you’re the doctor an’ all.” 

Eliot gave him a withering look but answered anyway. “Lookin’ like pneumonia. Decreased breath sounds in part of one lung and crackling noises in the rest.” He nodded to the pulse oximeter. “Ox saturation wasn’t too bad, but lower than normal, so we should watch that. Low BP, nothing dangerous.” 

Hardison let out a low whistle, then caught himself when he remembered Parker was asleep. “Should we take her to the doctor?” 

Eliot sighed and kept cutting carrots. “That’d take some doin’. She doesn’t believe that you’re s’posed to go to the doctor for pneumonia.” 

“That doesn’t surprise me. She doesn’t think you gotta see a doctor for dislocated joints, either,” Hardison said. 

Eliot shrugged. “To be fair, most’a the time you don’t.” He scraped the cut carrots into a soup pot and grabbed the garlic. He gestured to Hardison’s duffel near the table with his knife. “What’s that?” 

“Surprise for her,” Hardison said with a grin. 

“She ain’t big on surprises.” 

“She’ll like this one,” Hardison assured him, and grabbed the bag to go set up the surprise. 

He’d just gotten all the cables untangled when he remembered that he’d promised to update Sophie and Nate when he’d left the loft, and he stepped back to the kitchen area to call them. He put the call on speaker so Eliot could hear and add his own commentary. 

The phone rang only one and a half times before Nate picked up.  _ “Hardison,”  _ he greeted. 

“Hey, Nate. Eliot’s here too, say hi,” Hardison said, and Eliot scowled at him. 

“I’m not five, knock it off.” 

_ “How’s Parker?”  _ Nate asked, more worry in his voice than Hardison would have expected. 

“Sleepin’,” Hardison said. “Nate, did you know Eliot’s an EMT?” 

_ “What?”  _

“I already told you, I’m not,” Eliot snapped. “I took the coursework, that’s all.” 

_ “When did you do that?”  _ Nate asked. 

“Couple years ago. Listen, that’s not important right now,” Eliot said, looking highly annoyed. 

_ “Right, right. Any news?”  _

“I think it might be pneumonia,” Eliot said. 

Nate was silent for a long moment, then cursed, almost too quietly for Hardison to hear. 

_ “How bad?”  _ Nate asked, his voice sounding grim. 

“Not hospital-bad. Not at this point, at least. Oxygen saturation’s pretty good, an’ her fever isn’t dangerously high. BP’s a little low. No confusion, no nausea. We’ll keep an eye on her, an’ try to convince her to let us take her to the doctor,” Eliot said, finishing his chopping and putting the soup pot on the hot plate. 

_ “Yeah, I don’t see that happening,”  _ Nate said, sounding a little frazzled. _ “You can’t just take her without telling her what’s going on?”  _

Eliot stopped dead and his eyes flashed with anger for a brief moment as he clenched his fists on the countertop. 

“No,” he said slowly, then started moving again, turning on the heat on the hot plate. “I won’t drag her anywhere. You really want angry, sick Parker tryin’ to escape a moving car?” 

_ “Alright, fine.”  _

“We’ll try to convince her,” Hardison said. 

“But if she doesn’t want to go I ain’t gonna make her,” Eliot added. 

_ “Okay, okay,”  _ Nate said.  _ “Keep me updated, alright?”  _

“What’s your thoughts on the job?” Hardison asked before Nate could hang up. 

_ “Jacoby can probably wait a few days. We’ll keep an eye out but it shouldn’t hurt anything to hold off.”  _

“I’ll patch you in to the surveillance,” Hardison said. 

_ “Yeah, good call. Talk later,”  _ Nate said, and hung up. 

Eliot grumbled as Hardison put his phone away. Hardison couldn’t hear most of it, but it sounded angry. 

“... won’t just drag her to the doctor…” Hardison heard, and, “... not a fuckin’ child, Nate.” 

Hardison returned to his surprise for Parker and left Eliot to his stewing, but they both froze in worry every time Parker coughed in her sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> inspired by my real life best friend who didnt know you go to the doctor for pneumonia what the f u c k


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: discussions of child death, somewhat graphic descriptions of medical complications (in the hypothetical)

Nate paced idly around the loft, his thoughts everywhere but here. 

Parker with pneumonia, but Sam had also--no, he couldn’t think about that. 

Parker was not Sam. Parker was not his kid. Parker was a colleague, nothing more. 

Nate’s hand twitched toward his pocket, a half-conscious thought to call Archie and tell him--but no, she wasn’t  _ his  _ kid either. She didn’t even particularly like Archie. Nate sure as hell didn’t. 

Eliot had said she wasn’t looking too bad. That all her vitals were consistent with pneumonia, but she wasn’t in danger right now. 

God, he wished he’d asked for the numbers. He wasn’t sure what he would have done with them, but if he’d had the numbers in his head he might feel a little less helpless, like he could will her fever to break. 

Okay, the facts. Parker had pneumonia. Fever, low blood pressure, low oxygen saturation. 

High fever could lead to febrile seizures and brain damage, low blood pressure could lead to shock, low oxygen saturation could lead to hypoxemia and organ failure, untreated pneumonia could lead to lung abscess, sepsis, respiratory failure… 

Nate was dialling Maggie’s number before he knew what he was doing, and he didn’t hang up when he became conscious of that fact. 

The phone rang twice.  _ “Maggie Collins,”  _ a familiar voice said. 

“Maggie, it’s me,” Nate said, unable to make his voice sound normal. 

_ “Nate?”  _

“Yeah. I--uh. You got a minute?” Nate scrubbed a hand down his face. 

There was a long pause and then the faint sound of a door closing.  _ “What’s going on?”  _

“It’s just--if anyone was going to get it, it would be you,” Nate said, aware that he was on the edge of babbling. “The others--they don’t have the same experiences we do, they don’t think about the same things, they’re not--” 

_ “Nate, you’re scaring me,”  _ Maggie said gently, her voice so patient and Nate loved her and his heart hurt. It was almost enough to keep the words out of his mouth and spare her some of this pain. Almost. 

“It’s Parker,” Nate said. “We think she has pneumonia.” 

Nate knew how Maggie would react before she even processed what he’d said. She let out a heavy breath all at once, like the wind had been knocked out of her. 

“And I--all I can think about is when he caught it in the peds ward and went downhill--” Nate said, his mouth still going of its own accord no matter how much he didn’t want to be reopening this wound. “And then the move to Shriners and Dr. Dencourt--all those wires, Maggie--” 

_ “Nate,”  _ Maggie interrupted, and Nate would have paid anything not to hear the low undercurrent of heartbreak in her voice and double that amount to take away the hurt completely. 

“Maggie, what if Parker…” 

_ “Nate, breathe,”  _ Maggie instructed gently. Nate came to an abrupt stop in his pacing and sat heavily on the sofa, scrubbing a hand through his hair as he breathed.  _ “Okay,”  _ Maggie said after a few long seconds.  _ “How bad is it?”  _

“Eliot didn’t tell me the numbers,” Nate muttered. “Heart rate, oxygen saturation. I don’t know.” 

_ “Tell me what you do know,”  _ Maggie said quietly, gently. 

Nate let out another long breath. “She’s not bad enough to warrant hospitalization right now,” he said, fighting to keep his voice neutral. “Fever, low blood pressure. Nothing at danger levels yet.” 

As Nate told Maggie what he knew, he felt the relative inconsequence of Parker’s symptoms take root in his mind. 

_ “Has she started any treatment?”  _

“No,” Nate said. “Some Tylenol and sleep, that’s it.” 

Maggie was quiet for a few seconds.  _ “She’s not Sam, Nathan,”  _ she whispered. 

Nate squeezed his eyes shut. “You didn’t hear her coughing, Maggie,” he said. “It was like--like the past five years never happened and it was that day Sam started coughing and I--” 

_ “I know,”  _ Maggie said quietly. 

“Maggie, what do I do?” 

_ “Take care of her. Bring her some soup. Buy the big teddy bear she always wanted,” _ Maggie suggested.  _ “Take her to the doctor if it doesn’t let up.”  _

Nate let out a breath, the hold on his lungs loosening. “Yeah.” 

_ “She’ll be alright,”  _ Maggie said confidently, but quietly, so gently.  _ “She’s strong.”  _

Nate heard what Maggie didn’t say. Parker wasn’t already sick. This illness wouldn’t be deadly. 

_ “Nate,”  _ Maggie said.  _ “She’ll be alright.”  _

“I miss him, Mags,” was all Nate could say. “I miss him so goddamn much.” 

_ “I know. I do, too.”  _

Nate stayed on the line for another half minute, just feeling the pain in his heart and listening to the faint sound of Maggie breathing evenly. 

“Thanks, Maggie,” he mumbled when he could speak again. “I should go.” 

_ “Of course, Nate.”  _ Maggie sighed lightly.  _ “Keep me updated. I love you.”  _

“Love you too. I will.” 

Nate hung up and held his phone tight in both hands for a long time, a lifeline, and then started making a game plan.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: references to suffocation, slightly coercive medical treatment, references to dying and being dead

Parker woke to a hand on her wrist, mechanical sounds near her head, and pain in her chest. She recoiled automatically before her eyes were even open, wrenching her arm away and sitting up as quickly as she could under this weight in her limbs, trying to get away from the sound of metal on metal.

“No,” she gasped, and her breath caught in her chest and she coughed hard, her lungs straining for air and getting none. 

She felt a hand on her back and jerked away again, but she didn’t move as far or as fast as she wanted through the coughing. Her ribs ached like every single one was broken. She braced her hands in front of her on the mattress so she wouldn’t topple over, and it was like all of her strength was zapped out of her limbs. 

When she could finally breathe, gasping in lungfuls of air and still not feeling much relief, she looked around in tired panic. 

She was at home, in her warehouse, in bed, and she wasn’t alone in the cavernous room. 

Eliot was crouching by her bed, his face wearing an incomprehensible emotion, and as she squinted at him, her brain trying to keep up, he reached out again and grasped her elbow lightly. 

“Settle down,” he murmured, and Parker let him gently guide her to lay down on her side, which somehow seemed to help her breathe. She just breathed for a few seconds, her brain clearing some, and noticed that the mechanical sounds had stopped. 

“I was just checkin’ your pulse,” Eliot said, and took her wrist again and looked at his watch. Parker let him, too tired to fight again. He clucked his tongue when he let go. “Hundred and four.” 

Parker heard a hum from behind her bed. “Not  _ too  _ bad,” Hardison said, and Parker frowned. When had Hardison returned from his grocery run? How had she not heard him come in? What else had she missed? 

“Little high,” Eliot responded. “We’ll keep an eye on it.” 

Parker lay still as Eliot took her vitals again. Her chest hurt with every breath, and it got worse when Eliot dragged her to sit upright to take her blood pressure. It was glorious when he let her slump back down into the covers. 

Each time he finished taking one measurement he said the number out loud, and Parker wracked her foggy brain to try to remember if 92-over-58 was good. 

Eliot asked more questions, some he’d asked before, and Parker answered as best as she could through bone-deep fatigue and a stubborn need to keep all weaknesses to herself. 

“What are you doing?” she finally asked Hardison when he came around the side of her bed, fiddling with some device the size of a baseball connected to a wire. 

“It’s a surprise,” Hardison said. “Just a few more minutes.” 

Parker squinted up at him while he bracketed the device to her headboard, and resisted the urge to rip it off. She probably didn’t have the strength anyway. 

“Okay,” he said after a couple of minutes. “Get excited, Park, you’re gonna love this.” 

Parker doubted very much that was the case. 

Something bright flashed and Parker recoiled before she saw what it was. Nothing jumped out at her, no explosions rocked the warehouse, and no sound accompanied the light, so she tried to breathe. 

Her gaze landed on the far wall of the warehouse, up where the second story would be if the building didn’t have such high ceilings. A rectangle of blue shone on the wall, and as she watched a logo appeared briefly before it went black and the Netflix home menu popped up. 

“What--”

“You’re prob’ly gonna get bored here,” Hardison interrupted. “So I had an idea: hook up a good projector in here. You got so much flat white wall in this place, it would be perfect.” 

Hardison pushed a small, low table on wheels over next to the bed. A laptop sat on top and its screen showed the Netflix home screen too. Parker heard Eliot scoff over in the kitchen area. 

“It’s going to be too loud,” Parker complained. “Sound systems, they’re too loud, I’d get found out--” 

“Ah, I thought of that too!” Hardison said. “Look here,” he said, moving behind the headboard of Parker’s bed and she craned her neck to see. He pointed at the device he’d bracketed to the spokes, and she saw that there was another one on the other side of the bed that she hadn’t noticed. “Run of the mill computer speakers. They don’t get super loud, but it’s loud enough for you to hear from where you are now. Go ‘head, pick somethin’ to watch.” 

Parker picked at random from her Netflix list and the projection on the wall started showing the opening credits to  _ Mulan.  _ She could hear the music perfectly, but with none of the reverberations off the floor or high ceilings like she would have expected. 

“See?” Hardison asked. He handed Parker a tiny remote. “That controls the speakers if you can’t reach the little knob. The key is to use small speakers with good quality sound and just put them real close to where you want to hear from so you don’t get sound leakage. Same principle as headphones.” 

Parker craned her neck to try to see Hardison, and he stepped a little closer so she wouldn’t have to move. She held out a hand towards him and he took it. She hoped he could feel the thanks in her hand she couldn’t speak with her mouth. 

Eliot came back with a bowl and set it down next to the laptop. He hit the spacebar and the movie paused. Hardison sat on the other side of the bed and settled in, and Parker tried not to think about that. 

“While you’re up, you gotta eat somethin’,” Eliot said. 

“I’m not hungry,” Parker said. 

“Listen, Park,” Eliot said. “I’m gonna make my case, an’ then you decide how this is all gonna play out. Lunch, meds, doctor visits, the whole nine yards. Fair?” 

Parker nodded. 

“Alright,” Eliot said, then squared his shoulders and cleared his throat like he was stepping up to a podium on a stage. “Pneumonia takes two or three weeks minimum to shake, an’ that’s with aggressive treatment an’ a relatively mild case. You’re lookin’ at two-plus weeks in bed recovering, more if you fight accepted medical science every step of treatment. Now, that’s gonna make you lose weight, an’ some muscle tone, no matter what. But if you don’t eat as much as you can stomach, you’ll drop more pounds and get even weaker, an’ that’ll make it harder for you to fight the pneumonia an’ you’ll take even longer to be back up to peak condition once you shake it. You don’t drink enough fluids, your blood pressure drops even more and we gotta take you to the hospital for IV fluids. You don’t let us take you to the doctor, we can’t get you the antibiotics you need, an’ you’ll just get worse until either you die or we take you straight to the hospital ‘cuz you’ll be too weak to fight us then. You go to the doctor but don’t take your meds, you get worse. You don’t take the antibiotics exactly as directed, you create antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that spread into the world and kill people.” 

Eliot leveled Parker with a Look as he let all of that sink in. Parker wasn’t sure what emotion it was, but it was definitely a Look. 

“Up to you,” Eliot said lightly. 

Parker thought about everything Eliot said and was dismayed to find that all of his points were fair and probably true. She scowled and dragged herself upright, and Hardison sprang to help. When she was sitting up against her pillows, she pointed to the bowl of soup next to the laptop, and Eliot handed it to her smugly. 

Parker ate an experimental spoonful of soup and tried to hide her reaction, because all food Eliot made tasted good, even stuff Parker didn’t like otherwise, like vegetables. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction, though. 

“So, can we take you to the doctor or what?” Eliot asked after she took only a couple of bites, apparently not able to let her eat in peace first. 

Parker clanked the spoon into the ceramic bowl and made a face at him. “Fine,” she said. 

Eliot grinned and Parker made a frustrated noise, then started coughing. Hardison took the bowl of hot soup from her until her coughs subsided, then started to hand it back, but Parker waved him off. She leaned back against her pillows to catch her breath and swiped at her watering eyes. 

She hated this. Hated being weak and needing help (not that she  _ did  _ need help, but if Eliot and Hardison were willing to do all this work for no reason, who was she to stop them?) 

She needed to be in control of her mind and especially her body. She could survive anything as long as she could control these two things. If she could control her surroundings, even better. 

She was powerful and mysterious and silent and deadly and in control. 

But now she had so much of that power and control taken away, and she couldn’t even fight anyone to take it back. And here were Eliot and Hardison, essentially bragging that they had energy and the ability to  _ do  _ things and she didn’t. 

“You alright, Park?” Eliot asked. 

Parker wiped at her eyes once more and gave up on social interaction. “I’m tired,” she complained quietly, and slumped down, covered her head with her comforter, and squeezed her eyes shut. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: doctors and doctors offices, references to serious injury and death, hypothetical stabbing, child death, mention of bodily fluids (sputum/mucus)

Sophie flipped down the sun visor in her SUV, checked her makeup, and tucked away a strand of hair that had strayed out of place. She winked at herself and blew a kiss to get into character, and then turned off the car. 

It was a short walk to the front door of the clinic; Charlie Wells only shared a practice with one other doctor and a nurse practitioner, and the parking lot was small. A bell over the front door rang and she was greeted with the familiar but contradictory smells of antiques and dust with a strong overlay of medical disinfectant. 

The receptionist was a wiry young man in Batman scrubs, and he smiled politely at Sophie as she approached the counter. 

“Hi, how can I help you?” he asked. 

Sophie smiled back reservedly, saving the flirting for Charlie. “Good afternoon,” she said. “I called Dr. Wells a little while ago and his cell was off. I was nearby and thought I’d stop in and see if he was busy.” 

“Oh, well,” the receptionist evaded, “he’s in with patients right now, but I can see if he’s got an opening later today, or there’s an urgent care down the street--”

“Oh my goodness,” Sophie laughed, looking sheepish. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, that was misleading. See, we have a date tonight and I was calling to confirm the time he was going to pick me up.” 

The young man looked surprised. “Oh, I… I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I didn’t know he was dating again,” he said, and then clapped a hand over his mouth and turned red. “Sorry. He’s my uncle, I forget--sorry,” he mumbled behind his hand. 

Sophie didn’t have to fake the delighted giggle that came out of her. “That’s quite alright,” she assured him. “Can you let him know I’m out here, though? I can wait until he’s got a minute.” 

The young man swallowed hard, his ears still bright red, and turned as if to stand up from his desk. “Of course. I’ll go see--oh, um, what’s your name?” 

“Georgia Baldwin,” Sophie said smoothly, almost positive that was the right alias. She didn’t take as detailed of notes as she used to. 

“Right. Um, if you’ll have a seat, I’ll let him know.” 

Sophie leafed through an old magazine, ignoring the furtive glances she was getting from a patient waiting across the room and the young receptionist. 

Sooner than she anticipated, the door back into the exam rooms opened and Charlie Wells stood in the door, almost concealing his eagerness. 

“Georgia,” he said with a restrained smile. 

“Charlie,” she said with a smile of her own as she stood and went to him. She kissed his cheek and breezed past him further back into the office. 

He showed her the way to his private office, a well-appointed but disorganized space. Sophie sat in the only chair that didn’t have books or a coat thrown over it. 

“Sorry about the mess,” Charlie said nervously, shuffling some papers around on his desk. 

“Charlie, please, you know I don’t care about that,” Sophie said. 

“Ah, of course,” Charlie said, his usually smooth voice almost giddy. He put down the stack of files and smoothed his white coat at his sides, then stopped and smiled breathlessly at Sophie. “You look wonderful, Georgia.” 

Sophie giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. “Stop it, you charmer.” 

Charlie blushed, and then came back to his senses. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked, sitting on the edge of his desk and folding his hands in his lap. 

“For once, it’s something medical,” Sophie said, and Charlie looked surprised, and then a little worried. 

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” he asked. 

Sophie waved her hand dismissively, honestly a little touched. She almost never felt bad about lying to people, but Charlie was so kind that she almost felt a tiny pang of guilt. “No, no,” she assured him. “I’m just fine. My niece, though, is not doing well.” 

“What are her symptoms?” Charlie said, going to his bookshelf and half-reaching out to grab a medical text. 

“We think it’s garden variety pneumonia,” Sophie said. “She’s got an awful cough and a fever. Her half-brother is a paramedic and has been keeping an eye on her.” 

Charlie furrowed his brow. “Then what do you need my help with?” 

Sophie took a breath, letting her annoyance about Parker’s reluctance to see a doctor bleed through her facade. 

“She doesn’t trust doctors, and she trusts the medical knowledge of paramedics even less, but we’re growing worried,” Sophie explained. “She also works for me, and, well, in our line of work, discretion is…” 

“Is everything, yes,” Charlie said. He hummed and rubbed at his short beard. 

Sophie had never told Charlie specifically what Georgia did for a living, just hinted that it was illegal but not dangerous. She’d met him the year before at a pharmaceutical conference--back before she and Nate were... well, whatever it was they were doing--where she was practicing her medical terminology and he was complaining about the number of times he had been encouraged to sell a particular drug to people who didn’t need it. Sophie was fairly sure he suspected that she worked smuggling medication. She had liked him immediately, though he was far older than she usually dated, and she’d thought he would be useful to keep in contact with. She’d gone on a couple of coffee dates with him, cultivating the friendship and cementing his attraction to her. 

“We would pay you, of course,” Sophie added. “More than a regular visit would cost, and in cash.” 

“Is this a house call?” Charlie asked. 

“If possible I think she would prefer to come in,” Sophie said. “She doesn’t much like strangers in her space.” 

Charlie hummed again. He stood and went around to the other side of his desk and typed at his computer for a moment. “Tomorrow my colleague begins hospital service for a week,” he said. “And Ritter is out on vacation until Thursday, so I’ll have the clinic to myself tomorrow morning. I had a cancellation at nine?” he offered, his bushy eyebrows climbing his forehead as he looked up at Sophie. 

Sophie beamed. “Perfect,” she said. 

“Will you be coming with her?” 

“Yes, I think so,” Sophie said. “Her brother will come as well.” 

“I look forward to it,” Charlie said, grinning like a lovesick schoolboy. He came back around the desk and leaned back on it casually. “But tonight, can I take you to dinner?” 

“I would like that,” Sophie said softly. Nate would just have to understand.

 

* * *

 

Eliot sighed and rubbed at his forehead, a tension headache well on its way. 

Parker had been asleep for a couple of hours, but it took her a while to fall asleep between the bouts of coughing. Hardison had set up an air mattress in a darker corner of the warehouse for whoever was staying with Parker overnight (because no one wanted her to be alone like this) and had left, saying he wanted to get some work done on the briefing, but he’d seemed in an awful rush to get out of there. 

There were no windows in the warehouse, but the last time Eliot had checked the time it had been about sunset. Parker’s last vitals weren’t great; her oxygen saturation had dropped by one percent, her fever had risen by three-tenths of a degree, her heart rate was higher, her blood pressure was lower, and she was undoubtedly starting to get dehydrated. She’d nearly decked Eliot when he had pinched the back of her hand, and it had taken five minutes of arguing to convince her that that was a real way to check dehydration and he wasn’t just messing with her. 

The rest of the soup was packaged up and stored in the fridge, the dishes had been washed, Eliot’s medical gear was laid out on the table next to the pad where he was recording numbers, and there was nothing else to do for a while, until he went to take her vitals again at about ten. 

This was Eliot’s job. Between cons he didn’t think of himself as a hitter, he thought of himself more as the health and safety officer. Setting up and maintaining perimeters, first aid, reminding the more reckless of his colleagues that ladders and swords were not toys, making sure Parker and Hardison didn’t get rickets from poor diet, checking on Nate after he drank himself into a blackout, bullying everyone into staying up to date on their vaccinations, all that. 

There was only so much he could do, though. 

He couldn’t account for diseases without vaccines contracted out in the world, for snipers, for small-time criminals, for the toll of the stress of this career, for natural disasters. 

Whenever he ran through contingency plans in his head (his own, not Nate’s, because those were never complete enough to satisfy him) he always stopped his train of thought just short of  _ what if someone dies.  _ He would allow himself to create plans and maps and strategies for serious injury, hostage situations, fire and explosions, and multiple injured parties, but never, ever let it progress farther in his mental simulations. 

But now--

_ What if?  _

What if they couldn’t get Parker’s fever down, or her blood pressure up? It wasn’t looking like it would get to that point, but it was early yet, and Parker wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about medical treatments. What if she got better, but she couldn’t work anymore? 

Eliot’s catastrophizing was interrupted by a car door slamming outside, and he was instantly alert. He ran to the door as quietly as he could manage and tapped at the security system interface until it showed the view outside in night vision. 

There was a car parked across the way, just far enough that an outside observer wouldn’t think the owner was going to this particular warehouse. A sensible black sedan, but to a trained eye it was a pricey car, with sturdy machinery and a frame that could withstand a lot of punishment without any more damage than scratched paint. Eliot would know; it was Nate’s car. 

The man himself was walking steadily towards the warehouse, glancing around and behind him every few seconds. When he got near the door he pulled out his phone and put it to his ear. 

Eliot’s phone started vibrating in his pocket, and he hit decline before starting to throw deadbolts on the door. He glanced behind himself to check that he hadn’t woken Parker up, and then heaved the door open. 

Nate’s face was grim, and he carried a large shopping bag. 

“What’re you up to, Nate?” Eliot asked quietly, stepping outside and pulling the door almost shut behind himself. 

Nate raised the shopping bag slightly. “I thought I’d--” He stopped, sighed as if frustrated he couldn’t put his thoughts into words, and tried again. “Is Parker up?” 

“She’s asleep,” Eliot said. 

“Good, we shouldn’t wake her up,” Nate said, nodding. “Can I, uh, come in? I brought some… Some stuff.” 

Eliot hesitated, then opened the door and waved Nate in. “Just be quiet.” 

Eliot reset all the security, and when he finished he turned to see Nate’s shopping bag with the rest of the deliveries on the table, and Nate easing himself down in the chair next to Parker’s bed. He looked haunted. 

Eliot took his time brewing a pot of coffee, and when it was done he took a mug to Nate, who was watching Parker with a stare that told Eliot his mind was elsewhere. 

“You know, Parker would stab you if she knew you were watching her sleep,” Eliot murmured. 

Nate took the cup and held it in both his hands, not noticing or caring that the mug was scalding to the touch. 

“Sam had pneumonia,” Nate mumbled, not taking his eyes off Parker. 

Eliot froze mid stride on his way back to the kitchen area. He went instead to sit on the edge of the bed, far enough from Parker that he wouldn’t jostle her and wouldn’t be kicked if she moved in her sleep. 

“It didn’t--it was a month before,” Nate murmured. “He was in the hospital, and you can get it so quick in the hospital.” 

Eliot stayed quiet, not sure what to say. 

“It’s not what killed him, in the end,” Nate whispered. “But it sure didn’t help.” 

Parker coughed in her sleep, her brow furrowing. She turned automatically to cough into her pillow, and when she settled down she shifted back to a more comfortable position and Eliot could see a glob of sputum on the pillowcase. 

Nate saw it, too, and he squeezed his eyes shut. 

Eliot leaned over and grabbed a tissue, then cleaned up Parker’s pillow as best as he could without waking her. After throwing the tissue away he grabbed his pad of paper from the table and took it back over to the bed. 

“Here’s the record of her vitals,” Eliot said, and handed over the notebook. “I’ve been checking every four, five hours.” 

Nate studied it, and Eliot watched as tension leached from his shoulders, slowly but surely. 

“She’s gonna be alright, Nate,” Eliot murmured when it seemed like he had absorbed enough of the numbers. 

Nate took a deep breath. “How long ‘til her next vitals check?” he asked. 

Eliot checked the time. 8:19. He’d last checked at about five. 

“Hour and a half, give or take.” 

Nate nodded, his gaze going faraway again. “I’m gonna--I’m staying for a bit.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: references to child death, references to suffocation and death, mention of gun violence, hypothetical epidemics, and anxiety

Parker sighed and shifted in her sleep. 

Nate was roused from the edge of sleep by the very faint sound, and he loathed how easily his emotions went right back to Shriners Hospital for Children five years ago. Parker wasn’t Sam. Parker was not his kid. His emotional trauma had no place in this warehouse on the outskirts of Boston. 

Nate took a long drink of his now-cooled coffee and rubbed at his eyes. Falling asleep at a pneumonia patient’s bedside. Not his favorite way to spend an evening. 

At least they weren’t in a hospital. That would have been far too much. 

Eliot was reading at the kitchen table. Nate had tried to read his own book for a while, but that had evidently not gone well, judging from the way his paperback lay half-open at his feet, some of its pages folded under its own weight. He stooped to pick it up, and saw it open to the same page he had started reading on earlier. Damn. He needed to sleep more. 

As he straightened back up Parker suddenly curled in on herself, wracked with horrible coughs. 

Nate dropped his book again and scooted his chair closer automatically, his hand going to Parker’s back to comfort her like it was muscle memory. He glanced up at Eliot, who had put down his own book and had frozen half out of his chair, but he settled back down when he saw that Nate was handling it.

“You’re alright, you’re alright,” Nate found himself murmuring. “Don’t fight it. Cough as much as you need to.” 

After the first bout her eyes were open, wide and panicked as she sucked in as much air as she could before she was pulled back into a coughing fit and she scrunched up her eyes. 

When the second bout subsided she kept her eyes closed as she breathed hard. 

“Good,” Nate whispered. “Just relax. In and out,” he coached, rubbing her back in slow circles. 

Every ten seconds or so she had to cough once or twice, but she wasn’t pulled back in. 

After almost a minute she swiped at her watering eyes and furrowed her brow, but kept her eyes closed. “Don’t touch my back,” she griped, and Nate removed his hand. 

“Sorry,” Nate said. “Forgot.” 

Parker kept breathing slowly and deliberately, and after a few minutes she blinked her eyes open. 

“What are you doing here?” she asked Nate. 

“You’re sick,” Nate said casually, electing not to burden her with his tragic backstory. “Had to see for myself how you were doing.” 

“How long have you been here?” Parker asked, suddenly looking a little alarmed. 

Nate looked at his watch. “Couple hours,” he said. 

Parker rolled onto her back with a groan, but rolled back onto her side when the movement made her cough. She recovered quickly and scowled at Nate. “I hate not hearing people show up.” 

“I know,” Nate said. Parker wasn’t the only member of his crew who preferred to know who was around them at any given time. Eliot regularly took a punch-first-ask-questions-later approach to greeting unexpected visitors, and Nate was pretty sure Hardison was rigging up a functional trapdoor for his own apartment. 

Nate got up to grab the shopping bag he’d brought with him, and Eliot glanced pointedly at the various medical implements on the table and then up at Nate, and Nate held up a finger to tell him to wait. When he sat back in his chair at Parker’s bedside, scooting it back to a more impersonal distance, she propped herself up on one elbow, her curiosity getting the better of her. 

“What’s that?” she asked. 

“Brought you some stuff,” Nate said, and started pulling things out. 

The first and largest item was an eighteen inch plush chocolate bar with a bite taken out of one corner and a cartoon face grinning up at them. Parker grabbed at it, studied it for a long second, and then tucked it under the covers next to her (on the far side of her stuffed rabbit, though). 

“Thought you’d like that,” Nate muttered with a little satisfied smile as he continued pulling things out of the bag. 

Next came a package of lollipops, and Parker wrinkled her nose at the unflattering package design but nevertheless tore open the bag and studied a lollipop. 

“Those are the, uh, best candies for sore throats. They really work,” Nate explained with a little shrug as he dug around in the shopping bag. “They taste pretty good, too.” 

Next was a new blanket printed with the Star Wars droids, and Parker ooh-ed and grabbed at it, unfolding it only to tuck it next to her instead of spreading it over herself. 

“And last--this one took some calls around, but I managed to get my hands on it,” Nate said cryptically, pulling a large rolled piece of paper from the bag and handing it over. 

Parker coughed, that raspy, whispery sound like a car engine that wouldn’t turn over that sent Nate back to Shriners again every time, and when she unrolled the paper and realized what it was, she sat all the way up fast and got caught in a coughing fit. When she had recovered she pointed at the paper on her lap. 

“Is this ISG?” she asked. 

“Original blueprints, not copies, of the new wing,” Nate confirmed. "Just the first floor. It was all I could get." 

Parker gasped and pulled her hands away from the paper like she was in danger of her fingerprints getting all over it and giving her away. 

“I had a buddy way back when, investigated the Isabella Stewart-Gardner heist,” Nate said. “Of course, now I know it was Sophie.” 

Parker’s eyes never left the blueprint, and she traced routes with her finger hovering two inches above the paper. She gasped quietly. “It’s even got laser annotations and ductwork.” 

Nate nodded at Eliot, who rolled his eyes and started gathering up the stethoscope and thermometer and the rest. He deposited it all on the bed alongside the pad of paper. 

“Alright,” he said. “Since you’re up.” 

Parker made a face but held out her arm. Eliot clipped on the pulse oximeter and stuck the thermometer under her tongue and Parker made annoyed noises. 

“So, you’re an EMT,” Nate prompted. 

Eliot groaned. “I took the classes, skipped the clinical rotations, and didn’t take the exams,” he said. 

“Why not?”

“I’m not plannin’ on working in an ambulance anytime soon,” Eliot said, writing down Parker’s oxygen saturation after unclipping the little clamp from her finger. 

Nate took the thermometer as it beeped. “103 even,” he read, and Eliot frowned but wrote it down. “Why take the classes, then?” 

“How many times you been shot, Nate?” Eliot asked pointedly, and put the earpieces of the stethoscope in his ears. Nate waited as he listened to Parker’s lungs and then took her blood pressure. 

“How’s it look?” Nate asked as Eliot recorded everything. 

Eliot passed him the notebook before putting the equipment away. Nate scanned the numbers, noting with some satisfaction that Parker’s blood pressure wasn’t dropping at the same rate as it had been earlier, and her oxygen saturation was hovering at about 94%, give or take half a percent. 

Eliot got Nate’s attention and tossed him a pill bottle. 

“Two of those,” he told Nate. 

“It doesn’t wooooork,” Parker complained. 

Eliot made a frustrated noise. “I ain’t havin’ this argument with you again, Park,” he snapped. “Ibuprofen is what’s keepin’ your temperature down to a manageable level so we don’t hafta take you to the hospital, alright?” 

Nate chuckled as he shook out two pills. 

“Not you too,” Parker griped, but she took the pills from him and swallowed them down, then made a disgusted face and glared at her bottle of Gatorade. 

Eliot put something in the microwave, then grabbed two bottles of Gatorade, each a different flavor from the one in Parker's hands which had just a few sips gone. 

“You gotta drink somethin’. You don’t hafta drink the lemon-lime, but you hafta drink somethin’,” he said, offering both to Parker. She studied them, then grabbed the purple one. 

“Alright,” Eliot said, but whatever he was about to say was cut off by his phone ringing. “Yeah?” he answered, tucking his phone between his shoulder and ear as he grabbed a steaming bowl from the microwave. He listened intently as he handed the soup to Parker and doubled back to the kitchen area, then pressed a spoon into her hand. “Eat,” he instructed quietly. 

Parker stuck out her tongue at him, but ate anyway. 

“How’d you manage that?” Eliot asked over the phone. He laughed. “Oh man, Nate ain’t gonna like that.” 

Nate furrowed his brow and leaned forward. 

“Nah, I’ll let you tell ‘im,” Eliot said. He listened. “She’s doin’ alright. Should be fine to wait ‘til the morning.” A pause. “Yeah, I’ll bring her. Pick you up at a quarter to nine? Alright. Later.” 

He hung up and caught Nate’s eye. “Sophie’s gonna call you in a minute.” He had some kind of smirk on his face that Nate didn’t like. 

“For what?” Nate asked suspiciously. 

“She got Park a doctor’s appointment for the morning.” 

Parker groaned. “Noooo.” 

“Remember our deal?” Eliot asked. Nate raised an eyebrow at him and Eliot shook his head. 

Parker just grumbled into her soup. 

As if on cue, Nate’s phone rang. 

“I’m goin’ to sleep, Nate,” Eliot said before Nate could answer his phone. “Make sure she eats.” 

“‘She’ can still hear you,” Parker said irritably. 

Nate nodded and Eliot headed for the air mattress in the corner of the warehouse. Nate pulled out his phone and hit the green button. 

“Sophie,” he greeted, scrubbing a hand over his face. 

It was going to be a long night.

 

* * *

 

Hardison spent the night researching. 

Not just pneumonia and its symptoms and treatments and prognosis. He also listened to several hours’ worth of 911 calls classified as medical from the last month in the Boston area. The dispatch company didn’t classify farther, so he was forced to sift through gunshot wounds and heart attacks and broken bones to find calls for breathing problems that might have been pneumonia. He only found a few, because it occurred to him about five hours in that most of the time people didn’t call an ambulance for pneumonia. 

So he hacked into the Centers for Disease Control. 

And then he remembered Legionnaires disease. 

And then he had a panic attack. 

And then he couldn’t find any reported cases of Legionnaires disease in Boston in the last year. So he calmed down some. Until he remembered that the most severe outbreak of Legionnaires disease in history was traced to the air vents in a hotel. And that most people didn’t crawl around in air vents. And that Parker did. A lot. And then he had a second panic attack. 

When he had more or less recovered he fell down another rabbit hole of researching Legionnaires disease, but he couldn’t tell if Parker’s symptoms were consistent enough with Legionnaires or it was just run of the mill pneumonia. This helplessness did nothing to soothe his worry, and he spent a while pacing back and forth across the width of his living room, the only light coming from his computer and a lone table lamp on the opposite side of the room from his desk. 

Okay. So. 

Legionnaires disease was a type of pneumonia. It had a mortality rate of 28%. Bacterial pneumonia had a mortality rate of 1% with treatment. Viral pneumonia had a slightly higher mortality rate, because antibiotics didn’t help. Parker had said she was sick last week, and Eliot had interrogated her until she grudgingly revealed symptoms that were probably the flu, so there was a good chance this was viral. 

Hardison rubbed his palms over his short hair, the slight scratch of his curls against his palms soothing him. 

He didn’t like this. He didn’t like this. 

When he could focus again he started scouring everything he could think of--Facebook, Twitter, news sites, the CDC--for any scent of something that  _ could  _ be Legionnaires. If anyone else was sick, that wouldn’t be a good sign. 

He imagined all the lies that would have to be cooked up to keep them all out of jail if it  _ was  _ Legionnaires. They would have to report it to the CDC, and the epidemiologists would grill Parker about everywhere she’d been and everything she’d done, and she’d have to lie and come up with a reason she had been in the vents that wouldn’t get her arrested, or worse, fingerprinted. And she wouldn’t be able to lie that convincingly, so the rest of the crew would be rounded up and thrown in prison, too. 

God, he hoped it wasn’t Legionnaires. He wouldn’t be able to keep all the lies straight. And also there would be a much higher chance of Parker up and dying on them, and that would also be bad. 

Hardison groaned as he read again the prognosis section of the Wikipedia article about pneumonia, then thumped his head down on the desk and took a deep breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a little more written, but I'm still writing at this point! I think maybe 2-3 more chapters left in this story, so subscribe to make sure you get the rest!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: the same kind of illness stuff as previously in this fic, plus discussions of doctors and doctors' offices

Sophie waited for Eliot and Parker near the door of her apartment the next morning, no longer able to keep from worrying about Parker. She had managed just fine most of yesterday, getting regular updates from Eliot and Hardison, but Nate had apparently stayed the night at the warehouse because he was so worried about her, and that worried Sophie. Eliot hadn’t send an update of Parker’s condition this morning, either, and that didn’t help. 

A car honked out on the street, and Sophie hurriedly put down her coffee on the kitchen counter and left the apartment, hoping she could leave her worry behind in the apartment with the dregs of her coffee. 

Eliot drove his truck, and Parker lay curled up on her side in the narrow backseat, so Sophie took the passenger seat. 

“Mornin’,” Eliot greeted as he put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb. 

“How do you feel?” Sophie asked Parker, 

Parker just scowled, grumbled too quietly for Sophie to hear, and turned her face into the seat cushion. 

Sophie raised an eyebrow at Eliot. 

“‘Bout the same as last night,” he answered. “Temp only went up a tenth of a degree. Kept me up half the night coughin’, though.” 

Sophie hummed, satisfied. “So I hear you’re a paramedic?” she asked Eliot, settling into her seat. 

Parker laughed and immediately started coughing. Eliot grimaced. 

“I’m not gettin’ into it again,” Eliot said shortly, his hands tightening on the steering wheel. 

Sophie raised an eyebrow but let it go. She’d get the details from Hardison later. 

“What names we usin’?” Eliot asked. 

“Charlie knows me as Georgia Baldwin. I’ve given Parker Audrey Eichel,” Sophie said. “She’s my niece, and you’re my nephew and her half-brother, Chris Eichel, though I imagine Charlie at least suspects all of these are pseudonyms.” 

Parker hummed. “Aubrey,” she said, committing it to memory. 

“No,” Sophie said. “Au _ drey.”  _

“I said that,” Parker said. 

“Audrey. With a ‘D’,” Eliot said. “You said Aubrey, with a ‘B’.” 

“Okay fine, ‘Aubrey,’” Parker said. 

“No!” Eliot snapped. “The other one!” 

“I should have known this would happen,” Sophie muttered to herself, massaging her temples. 

At the clinic Parker slouched in her chair with her hood up and mumbled to herself while ignoring everyone around her. Eliot explained about the paramedic thing, and Sophie agreed that it was probably a good idea to have someone with official medical training around these hooligans. She quietly thought it might have been better for  _ her  _ to be the medical professional, though, given Eliot’s typical role in their cons and his penchant for sustaining severe injuries. 

“Turns out you have to do a whole buncha clinical rotations,” Eliot said. “ERs an’ ambulances, yeah, but OBGYNs an’ oncology an’ pediatrics an’ all that, too. We were too busy.” 

Sophie hummed. “That makes sen--”

The door opened and Charlie’s eager face poked out. He was grinning. “Audrey?” he asked, but he was looking at Sophie. 

Parker didn’t move until Eliot nudged her. “That’s you,” he whispered. “Come on.” 

Parker sighed and hauled herself up, ignoring Eliot’s proffered hand. She trudged over to Charlie, Eliot and Sophie a step behind. 

“Hi, Audrey,” Charlie said kindly. “I’m Dr. Wells.” He stuck out a hand and Parker hesitated before shaking it. 

“I’m Chris,” Eliot said, shaking Charlie’s hand next. “Audrey’s brother.” 

“Yes, the paramedic,” Charlie said. 

Eliot looked slightly put out but didn’t correct him. 

Charlie smiled at Sophie. “Georgia,” he said softly, and he grasped her elbow gently and leaned in to kiss her cheek, and Sophie blushed. 

Parker made a face. 

“Why don’t you all come on back,” Charlie said when he stepped back. “I’ll show you to the exam room first, and then we’ll get Audrey’s height and weight.” 

“Why do you need it?” Parker asked, cautiously following Charlie as he led them out of the waiting room. 

“So I can calculate the correct dosages of any medication you need,” Charlie explained smoothly. 

Parker hummed, indicating that that answer was satisfactory, and Sophie was relieved. When Parker was being particularly stubborn, the whole crew suffered for it. 

While Charlie and Parker went back into the hall to take Parker’s measurements, Eliot and Sophie sat in the exam room chairs. 

Eliot leaned forward. “You sure this guy is safe?” he whispered. 

“He couldn’t hurt a fly,” Sophie assured him. “But I’ve had Hardison vet him anyway. Clean, but not too clean.” 

Eliot sighed and tapped his fingers absentmindedly against the cover of a small notebook. 

Later, when Charlie had gotten as full of a history as Parker would let him have, perused Eliot’s notes of her vitals from the last 24 hours, and listened to Parker’s lungs himself, Charlie straightened up on his stool and crossed his arms, clearly about to get down to brass tacks. 

“Right,” he began. “Audrey, this looks like pneumonia, like your brother suspected. I’m going to order a chest x-ray to confirm, and I want to do a sputum culture to rule out Legionnaires disease.” 

Sophie gasped softly. She hadn’t even considered Legionnaires. 

“What do I have to do?” Parker whined. 

Charlie chuckled. “We actually have an x-ray machine here in the clinic, so that will be quick. And for the sputum culture, I essentially have you cough until something comes up, and then I send the mucus for testing to see what’s causing the pneumonia.” 

“Isn’t the first line treatment antibiotics in any case?” Eliot asked. 

“It is,” Charlie confirmed. 

“What other treatment do you recommend?” Sophie asked anxiously. Parker let out an annoyed huff and lay back on the crinkly paper-covered exam table. 

“This doesn’t warrant hospitalization at the moment. Keep monitoring her,” Charlie told Eliot, “and call me if her oxygen saturation dips below 93% or her fever gets over 104 degrees.” 

“Will do,” Eliot said, looking quietly suspicious. 

Eliot went with them to the x-ray chamber, because Parker was reluctant to go alone, and Sophie waited in the exam room. She sent off a text to update Nate, and too quickly he responded. 

Nate:  _ “He won’t hospitalize her?”  _

Sophie sighed and responded. 

Sophie:  _ “He doesn’t think it’s necessary at this point but said to keep him updated.”  _

Nate:  _ “That seems negligent. You should get a second opinion”  _

Sophie:  _ “He’s a good man and a good doctor. I trust his judgement.”  _

Before Nate could respond again Sophie sent one more text and then put her phone in her purse and left it there. 

Sophie:  _ “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, Nathan.”  _

Parker, Eliot, and Charlie returned a couple of minutes later, and Parker sat on the exam table with no prompting and lay back, throwing an arm over her eyes to shield them from the fluorescent lights. Sophie raised an eyebrow at Eliot, who just shrugged and sat in his chair again. 

“I sent the images over to our radiologist to take a look at, and that will take a few minutes. The sputum culture is on its way to the lab, too, but those results won’t be in for at least a few hours,” Charlie said. “I’ve got a call to make, and then I’ll be back with the results of the x-ray.” 

Parker lifted her head to shoot a panicked look at Sophie, who cleared her throat. Sophie trusted Charlie, but he knew at least two of them were criminals. They couldn’t risk him placing a call to the authorities. 

“Oh, um,” Sophie said. “I thought we might… go someplace private to talk,” she said, putting on a sultry voice and look. 

Charlie’s pupils dilated just slightly, and he glanced down blankly at the clipboard in his hands and back up. “O-okay,” he stammered, and despite the situation Sophie felt a little thrill like every other time she had this effect on men. 

Sophie stood and winked at Charlie, then looked meaningfully at Eliot. 

“You should update your brother,” she said, hoping Eliot understood she meant Hardison. Eliot nodded that he got it, and Sophie grinned and followed Charlie out of the room. 

Charlie led her to an unused exam room and closed the door, and Sophie smiled softly at him. 

“How are you?” Charlie asked quietly, keeping a respectful distance. 

“I’m a bit worried, to be honest,” Sophie said, and she was indeed being honest. “Though it’s comforting to know you’re not worried.” She paused and studied Charlie. “You’re _not_ worried, are you?” 

“No, no,” Charlie said reassuringly. “Audrey seems to feel miserable, and she isn’t out of the woods yet, but I’m confident she’ll make a full recovery.” 

Sophie let out a relieved breath. 

“Thank you,” she murmured, and took a step closer. “Thank you for doing this, Charlie.” 

Charlie blushed and looked at his hands. “Of course.” 

Sophie brushed a hand down his arm and wrapped her fingers loosely around his wrist, then leaned in just slightly. 

Parker’s coughing, echoing through the walls, interrupted whatever might have happened next, and Sophie withdrew her hand and stepped back. 

“So Audrey works for you?” Charlie asked awkwardly after clearing his throat, fumbling with his clipboard. “Must be nice having her nearby.” 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: medication, slightly coercive medical treatment, references to past abuse with resulting trauma behaviors, and brief mention of mild broken bones (past and present)

As soon as they got back to Parker’s warehouse she collapsed back in bed, drawing her covers up over her head and lapsing back into silence when she wasn’t coughing. 

She’d done it. She’d gone to the doctor, and Eliot and Hardison and Nate and Sophie couldn’t say anything more about it. She’d held up her end of the deal. Now they had to leave her alone. 

To her dismay, instead of immediately packing up his things and leaving, Eliot insisted on taking her temperature again and then made her take like six pills. He pointed out which ones were what as he dropped them into Parker’s palm, but she paid no attention, too busy making as many displeased faces as she could contort her face into to listen very hard. She swallowed down the pills with a gulp of nasty lukewarm Gatorade and then made some more faces, but Eliot wasn’t watching anymore. 

Parker made Eliot turn off the lights, and she pulled her covers back over her head but kept her face sticking out. She queued up  _ Bones  _ and watched until she was interrupted by Hardison’s arrival. 

“How you feelin’?” Hardison asked Parker before even putting down his bag. 

“Tired,” Parker said, and pointedly pressed play. 

“Then you should probably sleep,” Hardison said. 

“No,” Parker said flatly, too annoyed and fed up with human interaction to come up with some kind of explanation of why she didn’t want to sleep. 

Parker could hear Hardison and Eliot talking quietly, but they were too far away from her and the sound from her show masked most of the sound. 

“Hey, Park,” Eliot said, coming over to her bed and pausing her show again. “I’m headed home for a bit, but I’ll be back in a few hours.” 

“Just leave me alone,” Parker snapped, sitting up and tearing the blanket off of her head. “I’ve gone to the doctor. I’ve taken medicine. What else do you want from me?” 

Eliot furrowed his eyebrows and pressed his mouth into a line and Parker felt a cold ribbon of fear coil in her stomach before she even consciously recognized that expression, but when she did she gulped. That was the face Archie made when she was being Difficult. 

She ducked her head. “Sorry,” she mumbled as she squeezed her eyes shut. 

“Listen,” Eliot said, and his voice wasn’t as angry as Parker would have expected. It wasn’t very angry at all, in fact. “I’m real proud of you for goin’ to the doctor. I really am. An’ for takin’ medicine. I know it’s tough for you.” 

Parker let out a humorless laugh which turned into a spate of coughs. 

“You’re not out of the woods, though,” Eliot said. “We’ll give you some more space than we have been, an’ I’ll see if I can’t make it so there’s only one of us here at a time, but we aren’t gonna leave you all by yourself. We don’t want you dyin’ on us.” 

Parker glared down at her blanket-covered legs. 

“We’ll leave you alone mosta the time except when we check your vitals,” Hardison said, coming up to Parker’s bed, too. “And the rest of the time it’ll be like we aren’t even here.” 

“But you will be,” Parker mumbled. 

“Motivation to start feeling better,” Eliot said, his tone lightening some. “Means we’ll leave sooner.” 

Parker growled. “You said ‘two or three weeks,’” she accused. “You’re gonna be here for two or three weeks?” 

Hardison sighed and gave up. “Yeah,” he said. 

Parker slumped back down and pulled the blankets back over her head, careful to leave just enough of the blankets open so she could see the show. She poked a hand out to press play again and tried to block out everything else but the screen projected on the wall. 

“See you later, man,” Hardison said. 

“Sphygmomanometer, thermometer, and pulse ox are on the table,” Eliot said. “Check at about three and let me know.” 

“Sure thing,” Hardison said. 

Eliot left, and when Hardison had reset all of the locks he came back over to Parker’s bed. She pretended not to watch him approach out of the corner of her eye. 

“Can I sit with you?” he asked. “I was just gonna do some work here on my laptop.” 

Parker sighed, and when a sudden coughing fit subsided she groaned in defeat. “Fine.” 

Hardison settled himself next to Parker but on top of the covers, close enough that she could feel his weight pulling down the blankets that stretched over her, but not close enough that they were touching, even through the covers. 

Parker watched her show, Bunny cradled to her chest under the covers, and tried to forget the fact that she would essentially not be left alone for two weeks. She’d never gone more than eight hours without some alone time until now, even when she was a kid. Especially when she was a kid. She had been alone a lot. 

It didn’t work. She felt Hardison’s presence next to her more and more over the course of the episode. By the resolution her skin was crawling, and she itched to escape into the ductwork above her warehouse. Table to storage rack, then a high jump to catch the lip of the grate and pop it open, then one last high jump to get a handhold and pull herself up. Easy peasy. 

Then she remembered that her strength had been zapped by some kind of germ causing chaos in her lungs, and she quietly cursed to herself under the ending credits of the episode. 

She really and truly wasn’t going to get any alone time except when she took a shower, she realized, until her lungs were clear and her strength was back. Until Eliot was confident she was on the mend, except maybe not, he was the most likely to let her recuperate the rest of the way by herself. Eliot knew himself the virtues of nursing yourself back to health. No, her biggest obstacle was Hardison. He was so clingy he wouldn’t accept that she was better until she wasn’t coughing at all. 

Just thinking about coughing seemed to remind her lungs that they were full of fluid, and she lapsed into a coughing fit so persistent she missed almost five minutes of her show between coughing and gasping for air. 

Hardison had put his hand on her upper arm while she coughed, rubbing his thumb in slow, soothing circles, but when Parker could think again she shrugged him off. 

“I’m fine,” she snapped, reaching out to rewind the show. 

“Well, you’re not,” Hardison countered matter-of-factly. “But point taken.” 

They stayed like that for a couple of hours, Hardison running background checks on his laptop and Parker watching  _ Bones _ next to him. Parker began to relax when Hardison didn’t touch her again, even when she coughed so hard she had to sit up to keep from feeling like she was drowning. 

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she woke up to find her head near Hardison’s hip and her hand loosely gripping two of his fingers. He was shaking her hand gently, and she reflexively let go and slapped her hands down to her sides. 

“Parker, hey, we gotta check your vitals,” Hardison was saying, and it took Parker a long second to process what he was saying. 

She groaned and turned onto her side, away from him. 

“No, listen. I let you sleep a little longer and now Eliot’s wanting to know what your stats are,” Hardison said. “He said to check at three and it’s almost five now.” 

Parker slowly dragged herself to sit upright. 

“You can go back to sleep afterwards, but we gotta check. I don’t want Eliot to have cause to threaten me, you feel? ‘Cuz anything he threatens… he could follow through, is all I’m sayin’. So can I…?” Hardison trailed off. 

“Get it over with,” Parker said tiredly. 

Hardison took her temperature and oxygen saturation, and by the look on his face she could tell it wasn’t good. She couldn’t remember what temperature the doctor had warned them about, but she guessed her fever now was pretty close. She was starting to flash from boiling hot to freezing cold and back within minutes, and the only way to fight it without throwing the covers on and off herself constantly was to just pile on as many blankets as she could and distract herself when she swung back to unbearably hot. 

Hardison fiddled way longer than he should have with the blood pressure cuff before figuring it out. Parker decided not to point out that Eliot had also left an electronic version on the kitchen counter, because Hardison trying to figure out a manual sphygmomanometer was extremely funny. 

When he was done, he texted Eliot and then heated up some soup for the both of them. Parker made as many distinct displeased faces as she could, but ate, remembering her deal with Eliot. She would never, ever admit it, but she did actually feel a little better with some food in her system. 

“Wanna watch more  _ Bones?”  _ Hardison asked as he took Parker’s mostly-empty bowl. 

Parker grimaced, assuming he meant that he would watch, too. 

“Okay, okay, we could watch something else,” Hardison said. Seeing Parker’s continued grimace, he tried again. “Or you could read. Or sleep.” 

Parker started to haul herself up. “I’m taking a shower,” she announced. 

“You need help?” 

Parker growled. “No,” she said. Maybe Hardison hadn’t meant it to sound like a come-on, but she didn’t want platonic help in the shower, either. 

“Alright, alright. You let me know if you do, though, ‘kay?” Hardison said. 

Parker took her time showering, mostly out of fatigue and desire to be alone. The hot water felt great on her skin, but the steam made it very hard to breathe, and more than once she sat on the edge of the tub to rest. 

Too soon, though, she ran out of reasons that would justify spending any more time in the shower, especially considering her lungs felt noticeably heavier for some reason. 

After putting on fresh pajamas (her own pj pants and one of Eliot’s tshirts, stolen from his house) and squeezing as much water out of her hair as she could, she emerged from the bathroom to find Hardison sitting back on her bed on his laptop. 

The annoyance of that took a backseat for a few seconds to the feeling that she could breathe again in the comparatively cold and crisp air of the warehouse, and she stopped to lean against the bathroom door to breathe it in. 

When Parker didn’t join Hardison by half a minute after the bathroom door opened, he looked around for her. When he saw her leaning against the door he shoved his computer aside and jumped up. 

“Hey! You alright?” he asked, his hands coming up like he was going to steady her from ten yards away, but he dropped them before he got close. 

Parker nodded. “Just. The steam from the shower,” she said, her lungs not liking how much air she needed to lose to speak. She gestured vaguely. 

“Makes sense,” Hardison said. “Alright, come on. Back in bed.” 

Parker didn’t have the strength and breath to protest, so she took Hardison’s proffered arm and let him lead her back to her bed. When she got there she fell across the bed and groaned. 

“What is it?” Hardison asked from the edge of the bed. 

“Ribs,” Parker said shortly as she maneuvered herself to lay on her side with her head on her pillow like Eliot had shown her. 

“Doc said rib fractures, right?” Hardison asked, going around to the other side and sitting. 

“Mostly healed,” Parker confirmed. “Two fresh ones. Little ones.” 

Hardison let out a low whistle. “Gotta hurt.” 

Parker scoffed and then immediately regretted it. “I’ve had worse,” she panted. 

“Anything else?” Hardison asked. “Just ribs?” 

“My head,” Parker said. 

“I’m checking your ox again, ‘kay?” 

Parker didn’t answer, just held up one finger and waited with her eyes closed. 

When the meter had gotten a reading Hardison blew out a breath and Parker opened her eyes. Hardison’s brow was pushed down and he rubbed at his chin, his phone in his other hand. 

“Not lookin’ good, Park,” he said. 

“I’m fine,” she lied. 

“I’m callin’ Eliot.” 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: somewhat coercive medical treatment, references to suffocation and permanent damage from it, threats of violence, discussions of death and dying, mentions of gun violence, references to child death

Eliot was attempting to do housework when he got Hardison’s call. He’d left some dishes in the sink the day before, anticipating to come back home right after the briefing, and he had, except he’d left again two minutes later with his EMT supplies slung over his shoulder. There was laundry piled up from the last couple of weeks, and his kitchen needed a good scrubbing. 

He wouldn’t let himself be worried about Parker while he was home. Hardison was taking care of her, and the doctor hadn’t been too worried himself. 

So he was elbows deep in soapy water, scrubbing all of the burnt bits off of his stove when his phone rang, and he almost missed it in the time he took drying off his hands and fumbling with the tiny buttons. 

“Yeah,” he said, processing too late that it had been Hardison’s name on the caller ID, and when that finally processed he felt worry wash over him until he got it under wraps. 

_ “Hey, ‘s’me,”  _ Hardison said. He sounded anxious. There was some vague industrial noise on his end. He had stepped out of the warehouse. 

“What’s goin’ on?” Eliot asked. Hardison wouldn’t be calling unless something was wrong. 

_ “I sent you the stats a little bit ago, and you said to keep an eye out, so I did,”  _ Hardison babbled.  _ “They weren’t so bad then, like they were bad, but not bad bad--” _

“Hardison, what is it?” Eliot repeated. 

_ “She wanted to shower, an’ I wasn’t about to get in her way, but then when she got out, all of a sudden she’s way short of breath an’ she’s talkin’ about how much her ribs hurt,”  _ Hardison said. 

Eliot started putting the cleaning supplies away. “You still with her?” 

_ “Yeah, I just stepped outside, I didn’t wanna worry her.”  _

“Alright, go back in an’ check her oxygen sats. I’ll wait,” Eliot instructed. 

_ “I did already. Down to 91.7%,”  _ Hardison said. 

“Fuck,” Eliot groaned. “Okay, go back in, check her temperature an’ start packin’ a bag. Some papers for her, change of clothes, phone and charger, an’ that stuff the doc gave us this mornin’, it’s a stack of papers on the table. I’ll be there in thirty. Don’t tell her where we’re goin’.” 

_ “Thought we said we weren’t gonna trick her into goin’ to the hospital.”  _

“We aren’t. I’m gonna tell her when I get there,” Eliot said. “We’re just limitin’ how much time she has to fight us on it an’ talk us out of it.” 

_ “That’s a bit iffy for me,”  _ Hardison said. 

“Listen, you with me or not?” Eliot asked. “We aren’t draggin’ her there. She agreed she’d work with us, so she’s gotta go. Lower than ninety percent saturation an’ you start gettin’ into permanent damage.” 

Hardison was quiet for a long second.  _ “Fine. I won’t tell her.” _

“Thanks. I’m callin’ the doc and headin’ your way. You’ll wanna grab the notebook with her vitals an’ whatever you’ll need to stay overnight, too,” Eliot said as he started gathering his own things and shoving them in a spare backpack. “I’ve got papers as her brother but if you wanna grab papers as her husband or whatever they won’t kick you out. First degree relative or spouses.” 

Hardison hummed anxiously.  _ “I, uh, may sit this one out. Stay ‘til she gets checked out an’ admitted, if she does, but then I’m not real big on… hangin’ out in hospitals.”  _

“Whatever, man, I just need you involved ‘til I get to the warehouse. You can bail after that,” Eliot said as he went through his little house, double checking he wasn’t leaving any hazards out or lights on. 

Half an hour later, Eliot pulled up to the warehouse. He left his things in his truck and hurried into the warehouse, but his annoyance sprang back up when he opened the door. 

Parker was sitting upright in bed, her arms crossed and jaw set. Hardison sat in the chair next to the bed, his elbows propped up on his knees and his chin propped up in his hands, a posture of defeat. 

“I told you not to tell her,” Eliot muttered to Hardison, who grimaced. 

“She’s good, man.” 

“Hey, Park,” Eliot greeted casually. Hardison shot him a pleading look. 

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Parker said stubbornly. 

By then Eliot had gotten close enough to the center of the warehouse to get a good look at Parker. There was a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead and she had a ghostly paleness about her and dark circles under her eyes. She looked like she was having trouble staying awake and upright, and her breaths were shallow and far too fast. 

“Well, sit back and let’s talk about it,” Eliot said. 

Parker blinked, apparently surprised he wasn’t going to fling her over his shoulder and fireman-carry her to his truck. 

“What?” Parker asked, and then collected herself. “I’m not going.” 

“Get yourself comfy,” Eliot instructed, letting a calm come over him, or at least enough to fake it. He went around to the other side of the bed and sat near the footboard. “We’re gonna talk, and I don’t want you passin’ out during our conversation.” 

Hardison sat up, eyeing Eliot curiously. 

Parker, for her part, squinted suspiciously at Eliot, but uncrossed her arms and leaned back into her pillows, still scowling at him but making herself comfortable. Eliot was glad to see that her breaths evened out a little bit once her arms weren’t crossed. 

“Alright,” Eliot said. “Why don’t you wanna go?” 

Parker let out a little huff of a laugh like that was an absurd question to ask. She gave Eliot a long look like she was waiting for him to realize he was being dumb by asking. When he didn’t move or speak she rolled her eyes. “I’m not  _ that  _ sick.” 

“Hardison, you got the notebook?” Eliot asked, and Hardison silently passed it to him. He looked through the last several entries. “Alright, now Doc Wells said call him if your fever goes up to 104 or higher. You’re up to 103.9.” 

“See? So I’m fine,” Parker said, but she seemed to realize that that was bullshit. She slumped down a little lower into her covers. 

“Not gonna touch that,” Eliot muttered. “He also said call if your oxygen saturation dips below 93%, an’ last Hardison checked you were at 91.7%. I called the doctor already, an’ he said to bring you in, directly to the hospital.” 

Parker started her next point in the argument but was overtaken by a coughing fit of record duration, and Eliot handed her the bottle of Gatorade she still hadn’t managed to completely drain. She took a long gulp and put it down and settled further down in bed, now almost completely laying down. 

“Parker, I ain’t playin’,” Eliot said quietly. “I’ve been humorin’ you ‘cuz I know you don’t like doctors, but it’s gotten to the point where you  _ need  _ to be on oxygen if you don’t want lasting damage.” 

Parker, still out of breath, just grimaced at him, her eyes almost closed. 

Hardison sat forward and grabbed at her hand, then pressed his fingers to her wrist. After a long pause he looked worriedly at Eliot. “Pulse is pretty quick.” 

Eliot stood. “Alright Park, that’s it. We’re going.” 

“No we are not,” Parker said, snatching back her hand from Hardison, seeming to wake up a little more. 

“You remember our bargain?” Eliot asked, his patience wearing thin. “We made a deal. You said you’d cooperate with me, take your meds, all that. You promised.” 

“I said I’d go to the doctor,” Parker said. “I said I would take medicine. I said I would eat. I did  _ not  _ say I would go to the hospital.” 

Even with her face almost completely covered by her blankets Eliot could see her smug expression, though it was less effective than she probably intended given how pale and exhausted she looked. 

“Who cares about the  _ deal,  _ Parker?” Hardison said, his voice rising sharply in pitch. “You not hear what he said about  _ lasting damage?”  _

“I’m overriding our deal,” Eliot said simply. “We’re going to the hospital whether you like it or not.” 

“How many tasers do you think I have hidden in this bed?” Parker snapped viciously. "And knives?" 

Eliot stopped in his tracks, the plan to throw her over his shoulder fizzling in his mind before he could put it in action. He knew she had been serious, but if she was threatening real violence, getting them both to the hospital in one piece would be impossible, and in her state, she’d be in the most danger. 

“God, fine,” he snapped, throwing his hands up in surrender, and took a long lap around the warehouse, cursing under his breath. Then a second lap, his hands in his hair, trying to think through a plan. He heard Hardison pleading with Parker to reconsider, his own frustration growing, and Parker staying vicious and stubborn. 

Finally, a plan starting to solidify in his brain, Eliot finished his third lap around the warehouse by walking right out the door and pulling his phone out, ignoring Hardison’s desperate call to him as he left. 

He dialled and put the phone to his ear. It only rang once before it was picked up. 

_ “Charlie Wells.”  _

“Doc, hey, it’s me again,” Eliot said. “Chris, I mean. Audrey’s brother.” 

_ “Yes, of course. Are you on your way to the hospital? It’s Tufts Medical Center,”  _ Charlie said. 

“No, we had a slight change of plans,” Eliot said. 

_ “Is everything all right?”  _

“She won’t go,” Eliot said. 

Charlie was silent on the other end. 

“Trust me, Doc,” Eliot said before Charlie could say what he knew he would say. “It’s in no one’s best interest to  _ make  _ her go.”

 

* * *

 

Nate stared at his phone after Hardison hung up, his stomach a knot and nerves frayed. He stood, still staring at his phone, and slowly started walking to the window. He stared out at the building across the street and put his phone away. 

Parker was going to die. 

She was refusing treatment, essentially. Refusing treatment was one thing Nate would never, ever understand, had never understood. The doctors offered you a chance at  _ life,  _ a chance to come back from the shitty hand God or fate had dealt you, and you look at that chance, however big, and say “nah, the side effects wouldn’t be worth it.” 

The potential side effects of a potentially life-saving treatment wouldn’t be worth  _ the chance to not die?  _

He allowed himself a few minutes to be angry, but before long he couldn’t keep it up. He could no longer be angry at Parker when the reality set in that she could die. 

If Parker died… 

They’d come close to losing a team member before. Hardison had almost suffocated in a shallow grave, Eliot had almost concussed himself into a coma at the carnival, Nate himself had been shot several times, and that was all in the last few months. Confronting death was a regular part of their job. 

But this wasn’t a job. This wasn’t  _ for  _ anything. If Parker died, there would be no justice for a wronged citizen, no punishment for a corrupt politician or CEO. Parker’s death wouldn’t be a convenient parallel to an evil regime toppling. They couldn’t point to her headstone and say, “she died fighting for justice.” 

Parker would just… die. 

And if Parker was dead, there would be no one to bring levity to meetings, to insist on stopping at Tokyo Disney on their way home, to supply good quality harnesses and rigs, to shimmy through a building’s ductwork silently, to steal Nate’s cereal and driver’s license. 

This time Nate was fully aware of his own actions as he took his phone out of his pocket, scrolled through his contacts, and raised the phone to his ear. 

It only rang once. 

_ “Nate,”  _ Maggie greeted, her voice dull with anxiety. Nate knew the face that always accompanied that voice, could see her face in his head like she was there in the loft with him. 

“Maggie,” he said, his voice wrecked. He cleared his throat painfully. 

_ “Is everything okay?”  _ Maggie asked softly, like she was afraid of the answer. 

“Parker’s, uh. Doing pretty bad,” Nate said. “The doctor wants her admitted.” 

_ “That’s good, at least. They’ll be able to--”  _

“She won’t go,” Nate interrupted. 

Maggie was silent for a long moment.  _ “What?”  _ she whispered. 

“She won’t go to the hospital,” Nate repeated, sitting heavily in the closest chair and rubbing at his eyes and brow with his free hand. “She’s got rib fractures from coughing and an oxygen saturation so low it’ll start doing permanent damage soon, and she… she won’t go.” 

_ “... Oh,”  _ Maggie said after a long pause.  _ “Nate, I don’t kn--”  _

“You don’t have to do anything, Mags,” Nate interrupted. “Just please. Just. Talk to me for a few minutes.” 

He hated how affected he was by this, and how plain it was in his voice. 

He heard Maggie take a slow, deep breath.  _ “What happens next?”  _ she asked quietly. 

It took Nate a couple of tries to get any words out. “We’ll just try to… make her comfortable at home,” he whispered finally. 

After another long pause Maggie spoke.  _ “Should I fly up? Do you need… Can I help at all?”  _

Nate tried to think of something, anything that would save Parker that his team couldn’t get otherwise. 

“...No,” he said finally. “Unless you’ve got a cure for pneumonia up your sleeve. Or a cure for stubbornness.” 

Maggie laughed quietly.  _ “I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more stubborn.”  _

Nate tried to laugh but it died in his throat painfully. “Yeah.” 

When Maggie next spoke she sounded like she’d paused time for several hours and taken a break from the conversation. She sounded like she’d had some time to think.  _ “You said Eliot is taking care of her?”  _ she asked. 

“Yeah. And Hardison,” Nate said. 

_ “They’ll keep her from getting too sick, but if I know Parker, once she’s been miserable long enough she’ll be anxious to be back working again,”  _ Maggie said.  _ “She can’t sit still for long. Just like her dad.”  _

Nate let out a derisive laugh. “She won’t like you calling Archie her dad,” Nate said. 

_ “No, numbskull,”  _ Maggie said gently.  _ “You.”  _

Nate’s breath rushed out of him all at once and he felt a stab at his heart. 

Oh. 

_ “Too much?”  _ Maggie asked after a long pause in which Nate tried to restart his heart and his short-circuited brain. 

“A little. But you may be right,” he mumbled. 

Maggie paused again.  _ “She’s not going to die,”  _ she said softly, but Nate could hear the conviction in her voice. 

Nate hated that he couldn’t believe her. “How can you be so sure?” 

_ “Because I know you,”  _ Maggie said.  _ “Better than I know anyone else, even. And I know you’ll do whatever it takes.”  _

Nate let out a slow breath, digging his thumb and first finger hard into his eyes until he saw stars. He didn’t believe her, but God, he wanted to. 

“Can we--Mag, can we talk about something else?” Nate mumbled, embarrassed at showing this weakness. “I. Don’t want to think about it anymore.” 

Maggie hummed lightly.  _ “Well,”  _ she said as she thought.  _ “My sister is getting remarried.”  _

“Oh boy,” Nate said automatically, his distaste for his ex-sister-in-law rearing its head again after nearly five years. 

_ “Oh, stop,”  _ Maggie said.  _ “You’d like her if you got to know her.”  _

“She gave us a pink stroller, Maggie,” Nate reminded her. “And Sam was already born.” 

He tried so hard not to remember that Sam wasn’t still alive, tried to ride his annoyance through to whatever point Maggie was making without drowning. 

_ “It was a hand-me-down,”  _ Maggie retorted.  _ “Anyway, the wedding is in two months, in Colorado. Lord knows why…”  _

Nate listened to Maggie talk about the wedding, focused intently on her voice, so he wouldn’t slip back into the pit of grief from losing a second child. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my apologies for not updating very often. i've gotten to the point where writing is like pulling teeth but this story is almost over. probably one more chapter, and i'm not giving up on it. thanks for being patient <3


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings in this chapter for: references to suffocation, mention of needles, threats of coerced medical treatment, references to past death, medication, basically nothing not in previous chapters, light self-directed ableist language

“Parker, I swear to God,” Eliot growled. “If you’re not going to go to the hospital, you gotta let us treat you here.” 

Parker groaned, her eyes still closed, and rolled over onto her back. She blinked her eyes open and squinted up at Eliot. 

“What do you want?” she demanded, and coughed weakly. She had dark purple circles under her eyes like she’d gotten socked in the face twice, and her lips were starting to go pale. 

Eliot held up the length of clear tubing twisted into a lasso. “Oxygen. You need it.” 

Parker made a face. 

“Don’t give me that,” Eliot said, his temper getting shorter and shorter the longer she fought him. He wasn’t going to go back on his word and wouldn’t treat her without her consent, but he was nearing total exhaustion and it was getting hard to be at all patient. “Work with me here, Park. I’m just tryin’ to keep you alive.” 

“Fine,” Parker said with no small grimace, almost mockingly, but let Eliot drag her to sit propped up against a pile of pillows. She held up a hand to stop him before she let him put the loop of tubing over her head, and closed her eyes. She coughed for a moment, tugged at her hair with a grimace, pushed it out of her eyes, and dropped her hands with a tiny nod. 

Eliot felt a wave of relief wash over him as he pulled the tube over her head and helped her fit the cannula into her nose. Even if Parker let him do nothing else to help her, he could live with this. He glanced up and saw Hardison watching from the kitchen table, a look of relief on his face as well. As Eliot watched Hardison took a deep breath and nodded slowly, then went back to his computer. 

Eliot turned the flow valve on the oxygen tank next to Parker’s bed and she winced. 

“Feels weird,” she complained, and reached up to adjust the tube. 

“You can move it around however feels best,” Eliot said. “But don’t pull it outta your nose or I’ll have to give you the mask kind an’ you don’t want that.” 

Parker took a few deep breaths and blinked. “I can breathe,” she said, a little surprised. 

“Yeah,” Eliot said, leaving the ‘duh’ unspoken. “It’s oxygen.” 

Parker coughed. “Can I lay back down?” she asked. 

“In a second,” Eliot said as he walked to the table and rummaged through the bags. “Time for meds, an’ I wanna tape somethin’ to ya.” 

“Tape?” 

Eliot returned with three pills, a long cord, and a roll of tape. He handed over the pills and Parker absentmindedly took them without a fight. He held up the cord. “More long term pulse ox,” Eliot explained. “It’s comfier to wear than the clamp one.” 

Parker hummed and held up her hand. “I feel like a cyborg.” 

“Startin’ to look like one,” Hardison agreed. 

“This robot body is terrible,” Parker said as Eliot taped the meter to her finger. “It’s all soft and there’s something wrong with it.” 

“I’ll run a virus scan,” Hardison joked. 

“Y’all done?” Eliot asked irritably. 

“No,” Parker said, but didn’t keep joking when Eliot released her hand. 

“Next, fluids,” Eliot said. “Water or Gatorade?” 

“Gross,” Parker complained. 

Eliot gestured to his EMT bag. “It’s either you drink fluids yourself or I give you an IV,” he bluffed. He didn’t have the supplies to place an IV with him, and he wasn’t confident that he even could, but she didn’t know that. 

Parker narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t know how to do IVs,” she said. 

Eliot bit back a curse. “Hardison, pull up Youtube,” he said. 

“Yep,” Hardison said. “What’s the search?” 

“‘How to place IV in hand,’” Eliot said. 

Parker snatched her hands back from where they’d been resting in her lap and shoved them under the covers. “Nooooooo.” 

“Water or Gatorade?” Eliot repeated, and watched as Parker thought through all the ways she wanted to hurt him. 

“Gatorade but watered down,” she said finally. “Not too much.” 

“Flavor?” 

Parker groaned, faced with another meaningless choice. “Blue.” 

“Not a flavor,” Hardison chimed in. 

“You  _ know  _ what I  _ mean,”  _ Parker said exasperatedly. 

Eliot smirked and gathered up the leftover supplies, depositing them on the table around Hardison’s things to be sorted through later, and watered down a drink for Parker. 

When she had drunk a satisfactory amount, Eliot stopped urging her to keep drinking and let her put aside the glass. “I’m gonna make you drink more later,” he warned. 

“Ugh,” Parker groaned. She leaned back onto her pillows and threw up her hands exasperatedly. “What do I have to do now,  _ boss?”  _

Eliot rolled his eyes. “I’m done with you. You can do whatever, so long as you don’t leave this warehouse or strain yourself.” 

Parker slumped down into her covers. “I’m going to sleep. You have to leave.” 

“Not happenin’,” Eliot said, and to prove it, he grabbed his book and headed for the air mattress in the far corner. 

“We had a deal,” Parker reminded him icily. “One person here at a time. You promised.” 

Eliot hoped she was just lashing out at him in particular because he’d been the one bullying her into all of this, and their friendship hadn’t been damaged by it. He’d worked for a long time to build that trust. 

Hardison caught his eye and nodded meaningfully, then stood. “He’s keepin’ his promise. I’ll go,” he told Parker, and started packing up. 

Parker didn’t have a good retort to that offer, and Eliot nodded back at Hardison in thanks. 

“He’s the one knows about all this equipment anyway,” Hardison said, almost absentmindedly as he carefully packed away his laptop. 

Hardison left, and Eliot settled down on the air mattress for a bit. He could see Parker from where he lay, and he looked up every now and then to check on her. She slowly relaxed, her fidgeting with the oxygen tube tapering off, and before long she was asleep. Eliot’s book couldn’t hold his attention, and he nodded off himself. 

When he woke up, he had no idea what time it was. The lack of windows took away any outside indication of the time, and he’d taken off his watch earlier. He stood slowly, stretching, and crept over to Parker’s bed to check up on her. 

When he got there, though, his heart leapt into his throat. Parker was asleep, and had apparently tossed and turned a lot, because her oxygen cannula had come undone at one end and oxygen hissed faintly out of the disconnected line, and her lips were turning blue. 

Eliot dropped to his knees by her side and hurriedly reconnected the tubes, then grabbed at Parker’s wrist to feel her pulse. He didn’t have his watch on him to time it, but he didn’t need it; her pulse was racing. 

Her fingers twitched and her brow furrowed, and when he didn’t let go of her wrist she made a face and reached over with her free hand to smack at his hand. 

“Get  _ off,”  _ she mumbled without opening her eyes. 

Eliot let out a sigh of relief that she was conscious at all. Seeing her like that… it was like all of his training had gone out the window and he was a scared teenager at a hospital bedside staring up at a monitor full of numbers he didn’t understand again. But then she spoke that all dissolved and he was an EMT-trained adult man with a job and a house and a family. 

“Go back to sleep,” he mumbled, wiping at his eyes. “Just checkin’.” 

 

* * *

Nate meant to work on the Jacoby job. He got as far as opening Hardison’s briefing slideshow and the security feeds and then stared blankly at the words on the first slide for half an hour, his mind numb with horrified anticipation. 

When his phone rang, nearly an hour after he gave up and sat on his couch with his head in his hands, he jumped. His hands shook as he hit accept and brought it to his ear and a cold sweat broke out on his brow, his entire body and soul absolutely certain that this would be the call to tell him that Parker was dead. 

He couldn’t make his throat form words to say hello. 

_ “...Nate?” _ Eliot finally asked. 

Nate could only manage to clear his throat ineffectually. 

_ “Fine, whatever. Assuming it’s you an’ not someone stole your phone,” _ Eliot said casually, and the hold on Nate’s lungs loosened just a touch. 

“It’s me,” Nate confirmed finally, his throat still dry as a bone. 

_ “Yeah. Park’s doin’ fine,” _ Eliot said, and God but Nate didn’t quite believe him.  _ “Steroids and all that seems to be doin’ the trick.” _

“Vitals?” Nate asked, not letting himself believe it until he had some numbers he could cling to. 

_ “Uhh, hold on.” _ There was a light scuffling.  _ “Fever’s down some. 101.6. Pulse 80, could be better. Ox is up to 95%, that’s the real win. BP is stabilizing, too.” _

Nate let out a difficult breath, nodding to himself. “Good to hear.” 

_ “She’s gonna be alright, Nate,” _ Eliot said, dropping his voice to a mutter.  _ “Long as we make sure she sticks to treatment, she won’t get any worse.” _

“I’ll believe you when her fever breaks completely,” Nate said. 

Eliot sighed.  _ “Alright. Keep you posted.” _

Nate hung up and tossed his phone across the couch lightly. He ran his hands through his hair and down his face. He eyed the screens across the room. 

“Ah, hell,” he mumbled, and headed for his seat at the long desk. 

 

* * *

“You’re in the  _ way,”  _ Parker griped, trying to lean around Eliot to see her screen. 

“Hold  _ still,”  _ Eliot griped back, tugging at her hair. 

“That hurts!” Parker snarled, baring her teeth at him and forgetting about her show completely. 

Hardison, sitting at the table, snorted, and Parker made a mental note to put a scorpion in his car. 

“Is this necessary?” Parker demanded, swatting at Eliot’s hands. 

“You really want your hair to get so matted you gotta get it shaved off?” Eliot countered, pulling the brush out of Parker’s hair painfully and pointing at her with it. 

“Done it before,” Parker snapped, grabbing Eliot’s wrist before he could push the brush back into her hair. “Stop!” 

Eliot growled at her and she growled back. 

“Don’t make me separate you two,” Nate said calmly, not even looking up from the stack of court transcripts he was perusing. 

“Please do,” Parker griped. 

“When’s Soph getting here?” Hardison asked as Eliot went around behind Parker’s bed and reached over with the brush, only to be smacked lightly in the face by her flailing hand trying to keep him from doing exactly that. 

“Soon as she finishes lunch,” Nate said. 

Parker’s struggles with Eliot stopped suddenly as she was wracked with coughs, whispery, without much force behind them at first, and then louder and stronger. Eliot came around to the front again and dropped the brush on the bed next to her as if to have his hands ready to help. Hardison and Nate stopped what they were doing, too. 

Parker grimaced as she fought to breathe. She’d thought she was  _ done  _ with this. It had been two full weeks since she’d gone to the doctor. She’d finally had enough strength a few days ago to stop using the oxygen, and the crew had even started leaving her alone at night, but she still hadn’t had the strength to crawl up into the vents until last night. 

Finally, she could breathe, and Eliot watched her carefully. She took a couple of deep breaths, pleased with how clear her lungs felt after all that coughing. 

“I’m fine,” she said to the wary faces all around her. 

Eliot pushed his palm against her forehead and she grimaced but didn’t fight him on it. 

“No fever,” he said. 

“I  _ said  _ I’m  _ fine,”  _ Parker repeated, more forcefully. 

“Fine,” Eliot said, and picked up the brush again. “Then hold still and let me brush your hair.” 

Parker snarled at him. 

_ “Hellooooo,” _ they heard faintly from the general direction of the warehouse door. Hardison got up and went over, then started throwing deadbolts before Parker could get out a single word of warning. 

“Hey,” Hardison greeted Sophie as he stepped aside to let her in. “How’s Doc?” 

“Charlie’s fine,” Sophie said, shooting some kind of Look at Nate. 

“Was it a date?” Eliot asked. 

Sophie winked at him. “It was… a thank-you,” she said, ending a debate she didn’t know the others had been having before the hairbrush made an appearance. 

“Can we get started?” Nate asked suddenly, joining the conversation for the first time. He pushed the stack of court transcripts away from him. 

“Maybe,” Sophie said slowly, and it seemed to Parker that maybe she hadn’t been finished with her own conversation with Eliot and Hardison. She turned her attention to Parker. “How are you feeling? Still up to a job?” 

“If I don’t steal something in the next twenty-four hours that isn’t off one of you I will actually literally go crazy,” Parker said by way of an answer. 

Hardison patted his pockets and wrist suddenly. “What--my wallet!” 

Parker fished her hoard out from behind her pillow and started chucking things at their rightful owners. Hardison’s wallet, Eliot’s leather wrist cuff, Nate’s glasses, Hardison’s watch, Nate’s phone… 

“Like I said, something not off you guys,” Parker said, tossing Sophie’s fake passport. 

“We need to get you outta here,” Nate muttered. 

“I’m going straight to Isabella Stewart-Gardner,” Parker said. 

Sophie groaned. “You  _ told _ her?” she asked, smacking Nate on the arm with her passport. 

“I stole her the blueprints,” Nate said with a shrug. 

“I’m not telling you where the Vermeer is,” Sophie told Parker, then pointed at Nate, too, for good measure. 

“Can we  _ please, _ pretty please, do the briefing?” Hardison said loudly, pushing his laptop across the table. 

“Run it,” Parker and Eliot snapped at the same time, and Parker flicked Eliot for copying her. 

“Alright,” Nate said, shoving himself up out of his chair and stalking over. “I’m separating you two. Eliot, sit there.” He pointed at the chair he’d just left. “Parker, other side of the bed.” 

Parker stifled a cough as she moved, determined not to give Nate a reason to bench her again. 

She was  _ not  _ wasting any more time on this “being sick” nonsense. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's finally over! parker didn't die! everyone is a family! nate and eliot are traumatized! for more stories where all of the above things are true, i have a large backlog of sickfic/injuryfic! thanks for reading! thanks for sticking with me!


End file.
